All I can say is this - what if I don't trust Google one iota?
This new CA doesn't change much in that respect.
171–178 of 178 posts
All I can say is this - what if I don't trust Google one iota?
This new CA doesn't change much in that respect.
No real problem with Google running their own CA, but can't help but to think that the same people who provide the browser, the search engine and the OS, now also provide the certificates on who and what to trust. As much as we might trust Google, shouldn't there be something like separation of powers as a safeguard?
You can now have a website secured by a certificate issued by a Google CA, hosted on Google web infrastructure, with a domain registered using Google Domains, resolved using Google Public DNS, going over Google Fiber, in Google Chrome on a Google Chromebook. Google has officially vertically integrated the Internet.
What's remaining is: server written in Go, running on a Google server OS, located on a Google designed server appliance, which is centrally controlled by a Google designed microprocessor, which is finally manufactured in a Google owned semiconductor foundry. Oh, and the sand used for silicon purification is sourced from a Google-owned stretch of beach. I haven't considered the internals of the datacenter though...
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No, it really isn't. Download a copy of SpamAssassin, train it on 400 hand-picked spams from your own mailbox, train it on 400 arbitrary hams as well, and you will have very accurate spam filtering. I was shocked how well it worked; I run my own mail personally and use GMail at work, and the results are (subjectively) indistinguishable. A Dovecot plugin that keeps the Bayesian numbers up to date as I move messages in…
Maybe it has changed but I have vivid memories of training lots of spam a decade or so ago and still getting half-assed results. Google was the first email provider that really did a good job blocking spam.
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To clarify, that's a CA, not an ISP
But as Google wants to stop the Fiber project, they will also stop being one. Apparently being an ISP adds no value to the rest.
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I don't think this is a bad thing. ... This ought not be surprising: presumably, who better to say that Google is indeed Google than Google itself? The problem is that "connecting to a Google property" almost certainly includes their WiFi access points as well as other networking offerings. Which implies the ability to MiTM traffic encrypted from products not controlled by Google (other browsers, VPN clients, etc.).…
Google engineers have been very heavily involved in the CA/Browser Forum ( https://cabforum.org ), which sets issuance and trust rules for CAs. One of the things the CAB Forum is currently debating is a set of requirements mandating certificate transparency (CT) and obeying certificate authority authorization (CAA) records in DNS. If implemented for all of these roots (and I don't see why they wouldn't, given their p…
CT would create an open, unalterable record of
every cert published from all of these roots
and their subordinates.
That provides no substantiation for Google's push to be a Certificate Authority (CA). It arguably makes a case for Google to be a "Log Server" (which has its own troubling implications as that could then (now?) hook Google into the verification process of every certificate issued[1]). But absolutely nothing about CT needs/implies/warrants Google to become a CA. Given Google's strong push for making those
mandatory, I'm far more worried about a lot
of the CAs already in my trust store than I
am about these.
The very authority to which you are appealing is precisely the one which is suspect.0 - https://www.certificate-transparency.org/how-ct-works
1 - From [0]:
During the TLS handshake, the TLS client receives
the SSL certificate and the certificate’s SCT.
As usual, the TLS client validates the certificate
and its signature chain. In addition, the TLS
client validates the log’s signature on the SCT ...