
Distrust Let's Encrypt Subordinate Certificate - _jomo
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230797
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tptacek
This is just --- apologies for being coarse about it --- some rando filing a
bug, right? I looked and didn't see any evidence that he's somehow associated
with the Firefox project.

~~~
onli
If I see that right, it could be the Geschäftsführer (CEO) from
[https://www.psw-group.de/](https://www.psw-group.de/). I saw no further
Mozilla involvement in my short search either.

~~~
tptacek
Which is a CA reseller. Nice.

~~~
userbinator
No doubt a lot of other CAs are going to be pretty perturbed once LE really
gets widespread. What reason for existence will they have then? EV certs?

~~~
dingaling
> What reason for existence will they have then? EV certs?

I doubt that corporate users will move in any significant numbers to LE, even
for basic DV certs.

Two reasons:

1\. The certificate renewal process appears to be incompatible with most
corporate change-control processes I've encountered: _nothing_ may change on a
production server unless an admin is given authorisation to change it. A cron
job that could take all customer-facing services offline is just crazy[0].

2\. When something goes wrong with a cert issuance or renewal, corporate users
( want | need ) to be able to call a human to have them fix it, regardless of
cost. And even that cost is insignificant in context to revenue.

I'm sure LE will be popular with bloggers and hobby users. Beyond that?

[0] yes, the admins could run the LE client manually in non-prod and move the
certs over to production. But that's no easier than current cert renewals, and
would have to occur every 60-90 days.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Someone who is responsible for a site's uptime is going to be more
conservative about changes being made, most definitely.

As a sysadmin, I don't think Let's Encrypt's 90 day expiration period is too
onerous, but if I can sidestep that aggressive expiration period with a
$300-600 wildcard cert that expires yearly from a traditional CA, that's the
route I'm going to go (when my fully loaded costs to my employer are on the
low end of that cost per hour).

Disclaimer: I'm a big proponent of Let's Encrypt, and tweeted at Jeff Barr @
AWS asking if they could integrate its lifecycle into AWS' IAM SSL ecosystem.

~~~
userbinator
I think servers are patched a bit more often than 90 days now, so the
expiration period is not that short.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Patching servers and cycling SSL certificates are apples and oranges.
Depending on the size of the org, you may have several divisions that need to
have new key/certs distributed to them, and their environments updated through
change requests processes.

Not everyone are teams of 5-20 on EC2 or DigitalOcean.

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jpdus
From the comments:

A PITRA (point-in-time readiness assessment) is sufficient to begin issuing if
the formal audit follows in a timely fashion. It's not possible to have a
formal audit of the issuance process unless you are issuing; requiring it to
begin issuance would lead to a chicken-and-egg problem.

Gerv

~~~
rgbrenner
not really true. Let's encrypt is cross signed with IdenTrust. So whether the
ISRG certificate is trusted or not, they can still issue valid certificates.

------
idibidiart
The issue at hand matters far less than the issue that the issue at hand is
part of, which is the CA system itself. With the CA system, you have a two
tier threat model where the mighty and powerful can have all seeing eyes and
the consumer is told that all their https communication is secure and private.
Certificate Transparency and other proposals may help fix this, but the first
thing to do is to acknowledge that there is a problem, and so far the major
players have yet to acknowledge the fundamental problems of the current CA
system. LetsEncrypt makes it worse by promoting the wider adoption of this
flawed system. Certainly won't help keep us secure against the Chinese or
anyone with big resource. Update: Stating that there is no solution without
any knowledge of the existing solutions is itself part of the problem. Let's
start with this:
[https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain](https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain)

------
idibidiart
The issue at hand matters far less than the issue that the issue at hand is
part of, which is the CA system itself. With the CA system, you have a two
tier threat model where the mighty and powerful can have all seeing eyes and
the consumer is told that all their https communication is secure and private.
Certificate Transparency and other proposals may help fix this, but the first
thing to do is to acknowledge that there is a problem, and so far the major
players have yet to acknowledge the fundamental problems of the current CA
system. LetsEncrypt makes it worse by promoting the wider adoption of this
flawed system. Certainly won't help keep us secure against the Chinese or
anyone with big resource.

Update: Stating that there is no solution without any knowledge of the
existing solutions is itself part of the problem. Let's start with this:
[https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain](https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain)

~~~
userbinator
What alternatives are there? SSH-style "you have not visited this site before,
do you want to trust it?"? Distributed trust is a _hard_ problem.

~~~
idibidiart
Stating that there is no solution without any knowledge of the existing
solutions is itself part of the problem.

Let's start with this:

[https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain](https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain)

------
idibidiart
Iran gamed the CA system (DigiNotar?) to spy on their citizen's https traffic.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/06/diginotar_audit_damn...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/06/diginotar_audit_damning_fail/)

So it's OK to be paranoid, IMO. The CA system is radically flawed in that it
can be gamed by state actors.

~~~
rockdoe
Completely and utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand.

~~~
idibidiart
The issue at hand matters far less than the issue that the issue at hand is
part of :) which is the CA system itself.

You can try and move the corporatist agenda for a two tier security system
where the mighty and powerful have all seeing eyes and the consumer is told
that all their https communication is secure and private.

