Comment by cyphar
7 hours ago
Is it not obvious that not every global .com website owner wants to use only have the choice of US-run CAs (which can be subject to National Security Letters)? If you permit some other countries to certify .com then you're back to the same political question of which countries are allowed to run CAs.
It's also not at all a given that website owners would prefer the national CAs -- as an obvious example, most Rust projects (foo.rs) would probably not trust the Serbian CAs as much as they would LetsEncrypt. Even for website owners that live in the country, it seems possible that Chinese website owners might prefer to use non-Chinese CAs. And again, if the solution is to just special-case one American legal entity then we have just moved back to the original VeriSign-signs-everything model.
The real issue is that the CA model has been obviously broken since at least the days of the Comodo hack -- the trust decision for who can certify the website identity is made by the website owner but really clients are the ones that actually care (it's their data at the end of the day) and they have no input. Moxie had a proposal in 2011 to fix this by letting clients decide the policies for how a certificate should be trusted[1] and I think it is a far more workable solution than the alternatives. If one of the LetsEncrypt intermediates was compromised none of the alternative proposals would have any real hope of providing a workable mitigation.
>not every global .com website owner wants to use only have the choice of US-run CAs
.com wouldn't be covered by the proposal made in the post I replied to, because it isn't a ccTLD.
I also disagree with the post author's clarification in a sibling comment, saying that there should be a few major (US) CAs that can sign everything: As I originally understood it, the idea would really be to restrict signing of certs for ccTLD domains to CAs in the country in question, and only to those. There would not be a US CA that can sign certs for French domains and vice versa.
>most Rust projects (foo.rs) would probably not trust the Serbian CAs
Such domains are misuses of ccTLDs as originally envisioned anyway, and AFAIK the relevant standards bodies still see it that way, too.
>it seems possible that Chinese website owners might prefer to use non-Chinese CAs
For what reason? If it's a matter of resistance to government interference, it doesn't help, because ccTLD DNS records are ultimately under the control of that country's government anyway. It might make sense for very small countries in which operating a CA full-time isn't worth it for anyone; perhaps it should be possible for those to be grouped together, sure.
> Is it not obvious that not every global .com website owner wants to use only have the choice of US-run CAs
The major browsers are all US made though, so in the end there is an implicit trust on US vendors, even deeper than the trust on CA.
> It's also not at all a given that website owners would prefer the national CAs
The suggestion is to have a few major ones (LetsEncrypt) be able to sign everything like today but restrict the others. You can still choose to use the US one, just like you basically use CT logs from the US vendor today.
--
In practice, DNSSEC/DANE based solution may be the practical path forward along this line.