After learning how public key infrastructure really works, I've become quite disillusioned by the security it seems to provide. After all, what use is a certification authority, if basically any authoritarian state and intelligence service can get on that list? In some countries the distinction between government officials, spies and organized crime is already extremely blurry...
After all, what use is a certification authority, if basically any authoritarian state and intelligence service can get on that list?
Who says what an authoritarian state is? The reason there are a lot of CAs and some of them are governments is that having rules and policies for what it takes to be a CA is way better than having some random neckbeard at a browser maker deciding he read something in the newspaper yesterday about your country he didn't like, so you can't be a CA.
If you wanted to, you could build a browser that's a fork of Firefox/Chrome, and just doesn't show the padlock when a CA that you believe is under the thumb of an authoritarian state is the signer. However you would then have to exclude all American and British CA's, which would then exclude most SSLd sites, thus making your fork not much different to just deciding to never show any padlock at all and assert that everything is insecure so fuck it, let's (not) go shopping.
OK ..... back here in reality, real browser makers understand that there are more adversaries than governments, and actually SSL was designed to make online shopping safer, not be a tool of revolution. Judged by the "make shopping safer" standard it does a pretty great job. Judged by the "fight repressive regime and save the world" standard, it still does a surprisingly good job - the NSA doesn't seem to like it much at all - but it's unrealistic to expect an internet protocol designed in the mid 90s to do that.
That's a specific facet of the CA layout we've adopted for HTTPS; PKI as a whole does not require it. You need to trust something, but that something is often your own organization's CA (many VPNs) or the keys of people you've met (GPG) or the servers you've deployed (SSH, though SSH now supports use of CA keys).
Yes, the CA model we have today is deeply problematic. But there are organizations such as Google that are trying to improve the current situation. See e.g. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2668154 about their Certificate Transparency project.
In what situation would this be otherwise? "I'm going to do something that takes time and money and ultimately hurts me" - Masochists of America, unite under one CA?
Even if Jesus Christ managed a certificate authority, someone would complain. Everyone - even G-d - has a conflict of interest.
That's exactly what I'm saying, you can't expect one entity to solve this.
There's clearly some good people working at worthwhile things at Google. My concern is that a lot of those things doesn't end up being pushed by Google. Not only because it might hurt themselves, but because of non-obvious outside influence.
We shouldn't forget that many things we accuse the NSA for like lack of accountability, overzealous collection of data, the undermining of privacy etc. are all things we can expect from a corporation.
We also expect the GDP of over half of our society from corporations - the balance from government and non profits.
My point was that everyone has self interest, if one that's influential and has resources comes up with a proposal that is reasonably transparent and beneficial, it seems self-destructive to reject it out of distrust.
I don't necessarily think it's a bad proposal. It's seems rather good actually. Google is still one of the most tracking entities on the Internet and they can't really argue with NSLs even if they wanted to.
I just think the US government is the best organization in the world in asserting pressure and that Google, even if they really wanted to (which isn't clear), isn't going to end up with an agenda hugely contradictory to the US governments wishes. The US has a long history of using industry for geopolitical goals and the tech industry isn't any different.
If we do end up with a system that is in line with peoples fundamental rights I'll be the first one to commend them for it though.
You can remove their CA certificates from your browser/OS and if you click the lock icon on your browser you can check what CA the website you're on was signed.
You're right to say that the PKI doesn't work if you just want to trust any site that shows a padlock in the address bar, but it's useful if you do a little work.
> You're right to say that the PKI doesn't work if you just want to trust any site that shows a padlock in the address bar, but it's useful if you do a little work.
Not it isn't. It still suffers from not respecting name constraints. You can't setup trust for only a list of domains. If i run my own CA for some list of domains, there is no way i can prevent my CA from being able to sign for google.com. Instead people use wildcard certs so they can be delegated responsibility for a subdomain.
You can get a certificate for a fixed list of domains.
If name constraints were implemented more widely, that'd be great. But someone has to write the code, debug it, ship it, etc, and then you have to wait until lots of people have upgraded, etc, and ultimately wildcard certs work well enough.
In [most|all] countries the distinction between government officials, [corporations|financial institutions], spies and organized crime is already extremely blurry...
