The flipside of the same technical points is https://sslmate.com/blog/post/entrust_distrust_more_disrupti... where some non-browser clients don't handle this, or worse, handle it incorrectly.
My biggest concern is long-term censorship risk. I can imagine the list of trusted CAs getting whittled down over the next several decades (since it's a privilege, not a right!), until it's small enough for all of them to collude or be pressured into blocking some particular person or organization.
My point is, lack of options, aka availability, is (or may be perceived as) dangerous on multiple layers of of WebPKI.
There are already plenty of CAs across the pond.
(That of course had to be amended, because some of those additional requirement were actually good ideas like CT, and there should be room for legitimate innovation like shorter certs, and also it's OK for browsers to do suffifcient oversight for TSPs breaking the rules, like the ongoing delrev problem).
2) You don't actually need to build a browser to achieve this goal, you just need a root program, and a viable (to some extent) substitute already exists. cf. all "Qualified" stuff in EU lingo. So again why do the work and risk spectacular failure if you don't need to.
3) Building alternative browser for EU commerce that you'd have to use for single market, but likely wouldn't work for webpages from other countries would be a bad user experience. I know what I'm sayig, I use Qubes and I've got different VMs with separate browser instances for banking etc. I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't like to have a similar set up even with working clipboard.
There are things you can't achieve by regulation, e.g. Galileo the GPS replacement, which you can't regulate into existence. Or national clouds: GDPR, DSA, et al. won't magically spawn a fully loaded colo. Those surely need to be built, but another Chromium derivative would serve no purpose.
But if EC can legislate e-signatures into existence, then it follows that they can also legislate browsers into accepting Q certs, can they not?
Mind you, they did exactly that with document signing. They made a piece of paper say three things: 1) e-signatures made by private keys matching Qualified™ Certificates are legally equivalent to written signatures, 2) all authorities are required to accept e-signatures, 3) here's how to get qualified certificates.
Upon reading this enchated scroll, 3) magically spawned and went to live its own way. ID cards issued here to every citizen are smartcards preloaded with private keys for which you can download an X.509 cert good for everydoy use. The hard part was 2), because we needed to equip and retrain every single civil servant, big number of them were older people not happy to change the way they work. But it happened.
So if the hard part is building and the easy part is regulating, and they have prior art already exercised, then why bother competing with Google, on a loss leader, with taxpayer funds. And with non-technical feature, but a regulatory one, which would most likely case the technical aspects like performance and plugin availability to be neglected.
Personally: I'm for anything that takes leverage away from the CAs.
> Personally: I'm for anything that takes leverage away from the CAs.
You can automate trusted third parties all you want, but in the end you'll have trusted third parties one way or another (trust meshes still have third parties), and there. will. be. humans. involved.
In fact, if just Letsencrypt turned bad for some reason, it's already enough to break the CA system, whether browsers remove it or not.
Is this tautology helpful? For sure it's commonly used, but I honestly have a hard time seeing what information it conveys in cases like this.
Now of course the issue is that the information can't be encoded into the bundle, but I'm saying that's a bug and not a feature.
Can it not? It seems like this SCTNotAfter constraint is effectively an API change of the root CA list that downstream users have to in some way incorporate if they want their behavior to remain consistent with upstream browsers.
That doesn't necessarily mean full CT support – they might just as well choose to completely distrust anything tagged SCTNotAfter, or to ignore it.
That said, it might be better to intentionally break backwards compatibility as a forcing function to force downstream clients to make that decision intentionally, as failing open doesn't seem safe here. But I'm not sure if the Mozilla root program list ever intended to be consumed by non-browser clients in the first place.
That's what the blog post I linked in the top comment suggests is the "more disruptive than intended" approach. I don't think it's a good idea. Removing the root at `SCTNotAfter + max cert lifetime` is the appropriate thing.
There's an extra issue of not-often-updated systems too, since now you need to coordinate a system update at the right moment to remove the root.
Note that Mozilla supports not SCTNotAfter but DistrustAfter, which relies on the certificate's Not Before date. Since this provides no defense against backdating, it would presumably not be used with a seriously dangerous CA (e.g. DigiNotar). This makes it easy to justify removing roots at `DistrustAfter + max cert lifetime`.
On the other hand, SCTNotAfter provides meaningful security against a dangerous CA. If Mozilla begins using SCTNotAfter, I think non-browser consumers of the Mozilla root store will need to evaluate what to do with SCTNotAfter-tagged roots on a case-by-case basis.
Yet that is the thing that goes around under the name "ca-certificates" and practically all non-browser TLS on Linux everywhere is rooted in it! Regardless of what the intent was, that is the role of the Mozilla CA bundle now.
I wonder how much I should be concerned about Mozilla's trust store's trustworthiness, given their data grab with Firefox? I've switched to LibreWolf over that (more in protest than thinking I'm personally being targeted). But I'm pretty sure LibreWolf will still be using the Mozilla trust store?
I haven't thought through enough to understand the implications of the moneygrubbing AI grifters in senior management positions at Mozilla being in charge of my TLS trust store, but I'm not filled with joy at the idea.
Certificate trust really should be centralized at the OS level (like it used to be) and not every browser having its own, incompatible trusted roots. It's arrogance at its worst and it helps nobody.
When are you imagining this "used to be" true? This technology was invented about thirty years ago, by Netscape, which no longer exists but in effect continues as Mozilla. They don't write an operating system (then or now) so it's hard to see how this is "centralized at the OS level".
Firefox has their own trusted list, but still supports administrator-installed OS CA certificates by default, as far as I know (but importantly not OS-provided ones).
Here's an example of them doing just that:
https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-dist...
I think this is just a lack of perspective on your part.
My point was that Chrome (arguably not an insignificant browser) did use the OS’s root CA lists for 12 years (or 7, if you really want to count individual CA bans as a program; arguably both not an insignificant time span).
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.security.policy/c/3Q...
As Ryan explains this was basically the same thing with new paint on it, it reminds me of the UK's "Supreme Court". Let me digress briefly to explain:
On paper historically the UK didn't have an independent final court of appeal, significant appeals of the law would end up at the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary ("Law Lords" for short) who were actual Lords, in principle unelected legislators from the UK's upper chamber. Hundreds of years ago they really were just lords, not really judges at all. The US in contrast notionally has an independent final court of appeal, completely independent from the rest of the US government, much better. Except in reality the Law Lords were completely independent, chosen among the country's judges by independent hiring process while the US Supreme Court are just appointed hacks for the President's party, not especially competent or effective jurists but loyal to party values.
So the fresh coat of paint gave the UK a "Supreme Court" in 2009 by designating a building and sending exactly the same factually independent jurists to go work in that building with their independent final court of appeal and stop requiring them to notionally be Lords (although in practice they are all still granted the title "Lord") who met in some committee room in the Palace of Westminster. The thin appearance changed to match the ideals the Americans never met, the reality was exactly the same as before.
And that's what Ryan is writing about in that post. In theory there was now a Chrome root programme, in practice there already was, in principle now you need a sign-off from Ryan's team in practice you already did. In theory now you're now discussing inclusion on m.d.s.policy because you want Chrome trust programme approval, in practice that's already a big part of why you're there.
When Chrome 1.0 shipped it was important to deliver compatibility to gain market share. Soon it didn't matter, they could and did choose to depart from that compatibility to distinguish Chrome as better than the alternatives.
7 years for one browser compared to 30 years for all browsers does I'm afraid seem a long way from "like it used to be" and much more "how I wrongly thought it should work".
Https certificate trust is basically the last thing I think about when I choose an os. (And for certain OSes I use, I actively don't trust its authors/owners)
(As an erstwhile pentester, btw, fuck the OS certificate store; makes testing sites a colossal pain).
i already mentioned that ("may or may not"). former or latter, per-app CA management is an abomination from security and administrative perspectives. from the security perspective, abandonware (i.e. months old software at the rate things change in this business) will become effectively "bricked" by out-of-date CAs and out-of-date revocation lists, forcing the users to either migrate (more $$$), roll with broken TLS, or even bypass it entirely (more likely); from the administrative perspective, IT admins and devops guys will have to wrangle each application individually. it raises the hurdle from "keep your OS up-to-date" to "keep all of your applications up-to-date".
> As an erstwhile pentester
exactly. you're trying to get in. per-app config makes your life easier. as an erstwhile server-herder, i prefer the os store, which makes it easier for me to ensure everything is up-to-date, manage which 3rd-party CAs i trust & which i don't, and cut 3rd-parties out-of-the-loop entirely for in-house-only applications (protected by my own CA).
Can you please explain? I'm just curious, not arguing.
Which makes sense, because that would require them all to relinquish some power to their little corner of the Internet, which they are all unwilling to do.
This fuckery started with Google, dissatisfied with not having total control over the entire Internet, deciding they're going to rewrite the book for certificate trust in Chrome only (turns out after having captured the majority browser market share and having a de-facto monopoly, you can do whatever you want).
I don't blame Mozilla having their own roots because that is probably just incompetence on their part. It's more likely they traded figuring out interfacing with OS crypto APIs for upkeep on 30 year old Netscape cruft. Anyone who has had to maintain large scale deployments of Firefox understands this lament and knows what a pain in the ass it is.