Show HN: A tool for creating custom TLS CA bundles

mkcert.org

20 points·Lukasa··7 comments

OK, but you could also just run "dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates" or use Keychain Access to mark undesirable authorities "Do Not Trust".

"If you still don't trust us, we encourage you to download the source, build it yourself and run the service on your own hardware."

Or you could just download debian's ca-certificates package and cat together all the .crt files you choose into a .pem. Much quicker & simpler.

Trust exactly who you want to trust... as you download certificates from a random person's server.

But seriously, great idea, but wouldn't this be better as a command-line tool installable via a package manager? At least then it could be audited.

Yes indeed, and you can do just that. The API server is open-source[1], and it's been Dockerized. Anyone who's really paranoid should absolutely run the server themselves.

[1]: https://github.com/Lukasa/mkcert

That's great! Thanks for open sourcing it. I really don't think there's much value though if it's not self-hosted -- it just adds another point of failure to the CA system.

Edit: what if this were built into Firefox? Could the certificate manager accommodate some UI improvements and an export feature?

Re building into Firefox: It absolutely could, and I'd love it if someone went ahead and did it. That would be a big coup for Mozilla and it simply can't be that hard to do. Hell, the Chrome guys could do it, mkcert is build on one of Adam Langley's tools anyway.

As for self-hosting, I think anyone who wants to deploy mkcert in anger should self-host, and I believe I've made it trivial to do that. There are some steps I can still take to improve this: I want to pin Mozilla's cert in the client so that it can't be MITM'd, for example.

World need wider adoption of DANE instead.

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