"Science itself organized the German National Research and Education Network, DFN, the communications network for science and research in Germany. It connects universities and research institutions with one another and has become an integral part of the European and worldwide community of research and education networks."
Everyone can be a certificate authorithy. The problem is that browsers only recognize a small number of authorities and display a scary message for others.
According to the article those 600+ authorities are all trusted by the browsers...
Quote:
"Break into any Certificate Authority (or compromise the web applications that feed into it). As we learned from the SSL Observatory project, there are 600+ Certificate Authorities that your browser will trust; the attacker only needs to find one of those 600 that she is capable of breaking into."
https://www.eff.org/files/colour_map_of_CAs.pdf
Even the very small university I went to (their organization is terrible by the way) is a certificate authority. How is that even possible?