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Comment by letsgetreal | Hacker News Reader

Let's Encrypt allows anyone to have secure https communication, sure, but it doesn't address the question of website authenticity. I groan when I'm on an e-commerce site and I click on the browser URL lock icon and see a Let's Encrypt certificate because frankly anyone can create one for no cost and I don't know if it's the real website or if I made a URL typo. Say what you will about the expensive cert providers, but it's reassuring when you see DigiCert or Sectigo - with a company name and the address of the head office.

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It was never a reasonable goal of the WebPKI to authenticate entities; only to help establish end-to-end encryption between unrelated parties on the Internet. The WebPKI can ensure you're talking to whoever controls `ycombinator.com`, but it has to be up to some other layer of the security stack to decide whether you want to be talking to `ycombinator.com`. (This is in fact part of the logic behind FIDO2 and phishing-proof authentication).

FIDO2 doesn't solve the first website contact trust problem - only the HTTPS certificate does that.

It's good to want things!

> It was never a reasonable goal of the WebPKI to authenticate entities

The confusing thing is that this goal nonetheless appeared in some original marketing and explanations about the web PKI from the late 1990s when it was first introduced. There was another smaller burst of this when people were arguing over the formalization of DV certificates and of Google's UI changes that stopped treating EV specially (as some people found both of those changes objectionable).

I agree with you that the goal of authenticating entities was impractical, but the mental association and expectation around it still hasn't been completely dispelled. (I think I saw some form of this when doing support on the Let's Encrypt Community Forum, as people would sometimes complain that a site shouldn't have been allowed to have a certificate, either because it wasn't the organization they expected, or because it was malicious somehow.)

Right, and when people who haven't paid that much attention to the machinations of the WebPKI (who could blame them) talk about how weird it is that the browsers killed EV, this is an important part of the backstory: EV was mostly a failed attempt to make the WebPKI do this kind of "do-what-I-mean" entity authentication.

The problem as I see it is: there simply isn't one coherent global notion of what entity authentication means. It's situational.

To prove a very important point, that EV certificates are broken, someone obtained a "Stripe Inc." EV certificate by registering a company in a different state.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/nope-...

(The original site is no more, but this Arstechnica article has screenshots and a good summary)

Not really the point of ssl certs though. And I'm pretty sure those limitations are the smallest hurdle, most people wouldn't even care checking.

The "most people won't care argument" doesn't inspire confidence in the authenticity of the website.

It's essentially a self-signed cert that anyone could make with the false security of a root certificate authority.

This isn't correct.

There are two authentication properties that one might be interested in:

1. The binding of some real world identity (e.g., "Google") to the domain name ("google.com). 2. The binding of the domain name to a concrete Web site/connection.

The WebPKI is responsible for the second of these but not the first, and ensures that once you have the correct domain name, you are talking to the right site. This still leaves you with the problem of determining the right domain name, but there are other mechanisms for that. For example, you might search for the company name (though of course the search engines aren't perfect), or you might be given a link to click on (in which case you don't need to know the binding).

Yes, it is useful to know the real world identity of some site, but the problem is that real world identity is not a very well-defined technical concept, as names are often not unique, but instead are scoped geographically, by industry sector, etc. This was one of the reasons why EV certificates didn't really work well.

Obviously, this isn't a perfect situation, but the real world is complicated and it significantly reduces the attack surface.

Nothing mentioned will help for a website with a Let's Encrypt SSL cert. How can I know with confidence that I can conduct commerce with this website that purports to be the company and it's not a typo squatter from North Korea? A google search doesn't cut it. Nothing in this thread has answered that basic question.

It's a non-issue for DigiCert and Sectigo certs. I can click on the certs and see for myself that they're genuine.

No you can't. Even during the EV years, clowning an EV cert was more like a casual stunt for researchers than an actual disclosable event. In reality, there's nothing DigiCert is meaningfully doing to assure you about "conducting commerce" on sites.

> It's a non-issue for DigiCert and Sectigo certs. I can click on the certs and see for myself that they're genuine.

You can see for yourself that a Let's Encrypt certificate is genuine too.

Worse than typosquatting is EV’s problem that anyone can register a corporation with an identical name.

https://web.archive.org/web/20171211181630/https://stripe.ia...

I think it is working as intended.

If you do scam or fraud on that web site, they know where to find you.

... unless, of course, if the CA ain't doing the verification.....

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