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Comment by billpg | Hacker News Reader

When browsers default-trusted one CA, others companies, quite reasonably, wanted a piece of the action and asked to be included too. Time passed and we, the general public, are no longer part of the conversation about who should be default-trusted.

What if the browsers (and OS) didn't default-trust anyone? The various CA companies would have to include the general public in their public relations. We'd see CAs advertising for users to trust their roots. If a CA ever screwed up, they would feel it.

Another part of the rot is that TLS certs can only have one root CA. If I decided I don't trust DigiCert, I would effectively cut myself off from Hacker News, because a site can only have one root CA. If a site could have multiple CAs, I would still be able to connect so long as I trusted one.

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>What if the browsers (and OS) didn't default-trust anyone? The various CA companies would have to include the general public in their public relations. We'd see CAs advertising for users to trust their roots.

The mozilla CA program for instance, requires potential CAs to go under audits. Is what you're proposing (requiring CAs to hire an advertising/PR department to convince users) really an improvement? Bad companies can lie in either case, but at least the former feels like less waste of resources. Furthermore, forcing the user to make this decision significantly increases the social engineering risk. If the average users have to add a few dozen CAs every time they get a new computer, it will be very easy to social engineer them to add one more. See for instance, social engineering users into downloading and running malware payloads by saying they need to "update their flash player" or "install a codec".

>If a CA ever screwed up, they would feel it.

Nope, the too big-to-fail problem will still exist. Facebook fucked up, yet we're all still using it. Consumer boycotts rarely work. At least with browser vendors there's a unified bargaining group for users. Good luck getting measures like distrusting symantec or limiting certificate validities to 398 days via grassroots action.

> If a CA ever screwed up, they would feel it.

CAs have screwed up in the real world. And the result of those screw-ups were removal from root cert lists. And they closed down as a result. DigiNotar and WoSign both faced this calamity.

There was a time when root stores let anyone in who asked nicely. That time has long since passed however; the modern process is quite involved. See Mozilla's process here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Application_Process, and note that it calls out that it's expected to take two years to complete. It's not a pro forma policy: the Federal PKI [1] was not able to meet the requirements of inclusion into the root store because its rules for issuing certificates are not considered sufficient per modern browser requirements.

Quite frankly, I'd place far more trust in Mozilla's ability to audit CAs than my ability to do it myself, and I'd trust the average user's ability even less than myself. Arguing that CAs having to advertise to the user is a good idea for trust ignores the fact that unsavory companies openly abuse their users and yet still have high trust. (To say nothing of politicians...)

[1] This is the PKI system that's mandatory within the US government for internal certificates.

How would the general public make informed decisions about root CAs if the people paid to do it for living have problems doing it?

How would the general public create a collaborative online encyclopedia if the people paid to do it for a living have problems doing it?

How would the general public create an open source operating system if the people paid to do it for a living have problems doing it?

The "general public" isn't creating an online encyclopedia. If everyone using it edited it, it would most definitely suck.

The "general public" definitely isn't writing an open source operating system. That would be an even bigger disaster.

If you want to, you can contribute to both, just as you can edit your trusted certs list. But making that the default would be awful.

Better than that, if you have useful contributions to public oversight of the Web PKI you can contribute to m.d.s.policy.

https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.security.policy

For example m.d.s.policy is currently considering an application from NAVER Business Platform, a South Korean outfit and I'm quite sure that a native Korean IT person could usefully contribute to the discussion.

Writing one paragraph in an encyclopedia entry is a manageable task for anyone with a college education. Picking a complete and secure set of CA roots is not. To begin with, if your paragraph is wrong, it can be fixed. If your CA set is wrong, someone steals your credit card numbers.

We seem better off having the browser vendors bring the hammer down on CAs that are issuing bad certificates. Regular people don't know enough to make valid decisions about which CAs to trust, and I don't think they should have to know either.

That would be terrible. Regular users would either not be able to access anything or trust everything.

Currently they trust everything in fact.

Why should I trust Digicert for example? When did I make that decission?

What does 'trust' mean if the decission is made by others?

You trust Firefox (Mozilla), Mozilla trusts Digicert. If you don't trust Mozilla to make good security decisions, switch browsers. If you want to second-guess this particular decision, you can adjust your Firefox configuration.

As a developer what I find frustrating is that it is so difficult to make my browser trust 127.0.0.1.

Shouldn't there be an easy way to configure it to trust that?

What does it mean to trust an IP address? If you found that a link took you to gmail.com on 127.0.0.1:8716, would you be fine with providing your gmail credentials to that site?

https://1.1.1.1/ is a thing. certificate used: https://crt.sh/?id=1044327786

If the site provides a trusted certificate for gmail.com, things are fine. IP shouldn't matter, port probably will.

I would think I can trust anything on 127.0.0.1 because that can only be my local machine, right?

If there is something running on 127.0.0.1:8716 which I have not given permission to run then my machine is compromised already. No?

AFAIK http://localhost is treated the same as https://localhost so you shouldn't need a self signed certificate.

https://localhost doesn't work without a self-signed certificate...

Sure, but you can use http://localhost, and it will be treated as a secure origin

Some Oauth providers require https (even for localhost), and if I'm using WebAuthn, I have to have a certificate.

But what would WebAuthn for localhost even mean ?

The credentials in WebAuthn are bound to an FQDN (typically the name of the web server but e.g. news.ycombinator.com would be entitled to ask for WebAuthn credentials for ycombinator.com) so it's not as though this is irrelevant.

I can imagine a few dozen extra lines defining a special allowance for localhost in the WebAuthn spec., but then you're also building a bunch of special backend code to handle that too and for what?

I built a toy WebAuthn implementation to understand it better, but I did it on my vanity site, and I don't feel like it would really have been easier without.

> When browsers default-trusted one CA

And when was this, precisely? The copy of Netscape 1.0 I looked at didn't even have a UI to configure CAs.

Considering Netscape was released in December 1994 and SSL came out in February 1995, there were a lot of things still in infancy.

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