Add Honest Achmed's root certificate (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Add Honest Achmed's root certificate (2011)

bugzilla.mozilla.org

73 pointstimothyg25 comments

For a long time, I've argued we need leaf certificates to be double signable. That way there can be two chains of trust for a website. Then dropping a CA doesn't matter much, since all serious parties should have multiply signed paths to various roots of trust. Hence we solve the problem of CAs becoming to big to fail.

The current way cross-signing works is almost an accident, and only works for intermediate certificates. Because the 'signing cert' is looked up by name. An intermediate cert can be published twice with the same name, same key, but different signatures and signing cert. Hence doing this for a leaf certificate would mean 'just get two certificates'.

I see what you meant--having two for redundancy--but I was much more excited by the idea of having two where both had to be valid, as getting two organizations to issue you a bogus certificate is going to be a hell of a lot harder than getting one (not impossible, but often an entirely different kind of attack). Maybe we require three and at least two have to be valid, providing the benefits of both angles? ;P

Perhaps have this go together with an Extended Validation certificate?

I never find this kind of stuff funny... it's more snark than humor. It's also got a weird racial tinge on the tiresome trope of a somewhat distrustful middle eastern laborer, which makes it gross.

How is he somewhat distrustful? He’s Honest Achmed, it’s right there in the name. And the application is certainly very honest.

This is the same logic i use to disallow microsoft on my network. You need to at least be regular size or get hard to be on my network..........

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Nah bro, google "Achmed". Top search is "Achmed the Dead Terrorist".

Also, there's a lot of racist nails lying around, so being a nice strong anti racist hammer is not the worst thing I've been accused of.

Classic of the genre.

I remember around the time of the diginotar horrors looking at DANE and DNSSEC. As I understand it, DANE still isn't supported by browsers, and DNSSEC is still in a pitiful state.

DANE is a great idea in theory, botched by a bad practical implementation and low deployment (how much of that is related to the influence of the CA mafia is left as an exercise to the reader). There is some hope for the future: https://www.sidn.nl/en/news-and-blogs/new-opportunity-for-da...

DANE is even worse than the CAs in this regard. Nobody trusts the CAs, so they all have to record all their issuances in a transparency log. If a CA misissues, the browsers will kill it (as has happened with some of the largest CAs). There's no way to revoke a misissued DNSSEC signature and there's no transparency log for DNSSEC, nor will there ever be, because the browsers can't force DNS registries to implement it the way they could force CAs.

Fair point. I'd honestly not considered the flaws of DNSSEC and how they play with DANE.

Another day in tech, another deep sigh.

Contemporary discussion, nearly twelve years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463762

(114 comments)

Also:

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839315 (68 comments)

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15838324 (10 comments)

Inclusion policy is here

12 years ago, that meant something different.

Seems quite racist to me using the stereotype of the middle eastern shady used cars dealer? Do we want such content here (I'd say no)?

> Seems quite racist to me

So if it was Honest John you would be okay with that?

> Do we want such content here (I'd say no)?

You have 'flag' and 'downvote' buttons for this.

All johns are honest, it is what gets them in trouble with the vice squad....

I don't think there's a downvote button for posts.

There is the flag button, but it’s a little strong. Though racism is probably a valid reason to flag.

So the ACME protocol is a play on Achmed?

How much does an audit cost? How much work would it be to get Honest Achmeds root cert added to all major OSs and browsers?

Only 11 years later, Elon Musk started selling blue check marks on Twitter. Achmed was ahead of his time.

They were already meaningless

Please, "Honest Elon"

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