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Comment by gnabgib

7 hours ago

That's not what woodruff is talking about (I hope). The CT logs allow us to (later) find who/why it happened. CT Logs in no way help you stop something. (Depends a bit on how software reacts to apparently invalid issuance - but since these have the real keys the issuance will look normal).

Revocation lists allow you to stop/block bad issues. Both are maintained/decided (you could post to another service) by the issuer, not the leaf. CRL records would stop this (but some software has decided that's too slow). In general software uses the OS trust-store first (fragmented on Linux). Firefox and Java have their own independent paths. Chrome ignores CRLs

CT logs only tell you something happened if the certificate was registered in the log. But if you are attacking software that doesn't check if the cert was registered, then you don't need to register the cert, and there won't be anything in the log.

My point is you can forge a cert, without putting it in the log, and a lot of software will still be vulnerable to it.