Hacker News Reader

Comment by toddgardner | Hacker News Reader

It's more complicated than that. Apple (along with Google and Mozilla) basically held the CA's hostage. They started unilaterally reducing lifetimes. It was happening whether the CAB approved it or not.

The vote was more about whether the CAB would continue to be relevant. "Accept the reality, or browsers aren't even going to show up anymore".

I wrote a bunch about this recently: https://www.certkit.io/blog/47-day-certificate-ultimatum

View on HN

It's interesting that this is pretty much identical to the WHATWG/W3C situation: there is theoretically a standards body, but in practice it's defunct; the browsers announce what they will ship, and the "standards body" can do nothing but meekly comply.

The difference being that there's at least a little bit of popular dissatisfaction with the status quo of browsers unilaterally dictating web standards, whereas no one came to the defense of CAs, since everybody hated them. A useful lesson that you need to do reputation management even if you're running a successful racket, since if people hate you enough they might not stick up for you even if someone comes for you "illegally".

Uber is a morally bankrupt company that built its market position through criminal conduct, but everyone looked the other way because they hated the taxi industry even more.

The CA industry is the new taxi industry.

Thanks for this history, I wasn't aware. It's an interesting point that if this is happening anyways by Apple's fiat, it's in the legacy CAs' interest to even further accelerate the mandatory timeline, so they can pivot to consulting services for their existing customers.

I do still feel that "that blog/publication that had immense cultural impact years ago, that was acquired/put on life support with annual certificate updates, will now be taken offline rather than migrated to a system that can support ACME automations, because the consultants charge more than the ad revenue" will be an unfortunate class of casualty. But that's progress, I suppose.

I think it's more broadly "browsers vs. CAs", I think the balance of power shifted sharply after the Symantec distrusting, and I think very few people on HN would prefer the status quo ante of that power shift if we laid out what it meant.

Today, people are complaining that automation of certificate renewals are annoying (I'm sure they were). Before that, the complaint was that random US companies were simply buying and deploying their own root certificates, issuing certs for arbitrary strangers domains, so their IT teams wouldn't have to update their desktop configurations.

Things are better now.

That was an interesting read, thanks! Two questions:

- What is the problem with stale certificates if a domain changes hands? It seems to me that whether they renew the certificate or not, the security situation for the user is still the same, no?

- Is CertKit a similar solution to Anchor Relay? (https://anchor.dev/relay)

The problem is that the old owner still has a valid certificate for some period of time.

Except this is going the wrong way. We should be discouraging frequent domain ownership changes not making them easier. New owners getting visibility into traffic meant for the old owners is as much if not a bigger problem.

> What is the problem with stale certificates if a domain changes hands?

The previous owners have valid certificates for up to 398 days. If they are a malicious party cable of doing a man-in-the-middle attack, they can present a valid certificate and fully impersonate the owner. For example, when Stripe started, they purchased the domain from another party, who had a valid stripe.com payment certificate for nearly a year. (https://www.certkit.io/blog/bygonessl-and-the-certificate-th...)

> Is CertKit a similar solution to Anchor Relay?

I hadn't heard about anchor relay before, thanks for the link!

CertKit is similar, but broader. Anchor says it sits between your ACME clients and the CA and simplifies the validation steps, which is super useful. But you still have to run ACME clients and have a bunch of automation logic running on your end.

CertKit IS the ACME client. You CNAME the challenge record to us and we do all the communication with the CAs and store/renew/revoke your certificates centrally. Your systems can pull (or be pushed) the certs they need via our API, then we monitor the HTTPS endpoints to make sure the correct cert is running. Its a fully-audited centralized certificate management.

Not quite true - some CAs were not 'held hostage' - some agree with the changes and supported them. See the endorsers for SC-081.

Thanks. This is an informative piece.

Which AI did you use for writing it? It's pretty good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com