Tying real world identities to public keys is very much a part of crypto. Windows does it with package signing and EV, Debian does it with people holding up their passports at Linux events, and web sites do it with EV HTTPS.
And yes, we (CertSimple) are looking at Certbot support for EV.
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=certsimple.co...
I had been logging in to update but the rate of new, severe openssl vulnerabilities - and the risk of missing one, fairly obviously - is high enough I'd rather just apply them immediately. yum-cron's also now enabled to apply openssl updates as soon as they're issued.
How much faster? The one time I've gotten an EV cert it took a couple hours to get verified. Didn't seem too long at all and compared to the time to plan the swap out of the cert in production, the wait was a non issue.
The verification itself was a joke though. It was basically just a phone call asking "Are you X? Ok great! Here's your cert!"
> Tying real world identities to public keys is very much a part of crypto.
Joe User isn't going to look at the details and validation chain of a certificate. The whole idea of the green bar for "more trusted" is a scamola by the cert providers as they saw the writing on the wall for their margins going to zero for domain validated ones (granted they saw it early enough to get traction on it!).
> The verification was basically just a phone call asking "Are you X? Ok great! Here's your cert!"
Congratulations, you have an active registered company that was already well known to qualified third parties. Before that phone call happens, the CA has to verify your existence and status by government records and a qualified third party. There are additional steps for certain company structures. They don't just call you and you get the cert - and people are often rejected.
> Joe User isn't going to look at the details and validation chain of a certificate.
Nobody is expecting users to look at the cert details or verification chain. Just the name in middle of the address bar.
From the front page of HN right now:
https://hackernoon.com/this-is-what-apple-should-tell-you-wh...
https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*DzlpfS4cesC6...
"The green text on the address bar shows the site really belongs to Apple Inc."
This would be a legit argument if EV HTTPS actually achieved that goal. They don't, though: the identity verification around EV HTTPS is a joke.
All CAs are audited against the same guidelines: they should be requiring the same levels of proof. From what I've seen (our tech works with different EV providers) that's generally the case.
While EV is certainly more than a phone call, there are certainly flaws. The EV guidelines change over time and I'd like to get them tightened with additional requirements in particular circumstances.