The encryption part is easy -- you don't need CAs for that -- but they're a necessary evil when it comes to verifying ownership. You need to delegate trust to someone, otherwise using the internet becomes too cumbersome.

Automated SSL providers effectively mitigate the idea of "verifying ownership" or "delegating trust", because for example, someone can buy a domain like... googIe.com, get an SSL cert for it, and it's "valid". We're right back to the same level of security of you just checking that the browser bar points at the domain you actually intended to go to. (In this example, bear in mind, Google doesn't use an EV cert, so they'd be equally valid to a web browser. And a lot of EV certs I believe are getting distrusted soon as it is.)

CAs seem like a system that really doesn't work today, we've seen multiple times that many of these CAs aren't worth delegating trust to to begin with, and it causes an unnecessary cost and burden upon just... encrypting traffic.

> We're right back to the same level of security of you just checking that the browser bar points at the domain you actually intended to go to.

So you’re sitting in a cafe, and you go to Facebook.com. Lo and behold, someone’s installed a MITM proxy on the router, that presents its own encryption key instead of Facebook’s, and your browser has no way to tell this because the CA system isn’t a thing. They now have your password, can steal your session to spam your friends, whatever else. How do you prevent that?

Automated domain validated certificates are meant to ensure that when you go to Facebook.com, you’re talking to Facebook.com and not a MITMing router on the way there. They’re not meant to protect against phishing - they’re meant to protect against the very real cases I’ve seen where my mobile ISP adds random JavaScript into the web pages I view, and sells information about me based on my use of the web.

Idea that's been floated before: TOFU plus a distributed network of people automatically sharing what cert fingerprints they encounter. Chances are high that you already hit Facebook on your $device, and if you all of a sudden retrieved a certificate that didn't match the one you had before, or that most other people online hadn't seen, halt and throw up the warnings.

Given the exploitability, laziness, general failure to follow best practices, not to mention misaligned incentives that we're seeing from major CA vendors, having centralized CAs seems like an ever-worsening solution.

Where do you store the trust from all those people to be able to query the statistics? That's just another central point of failure.

It's not as if distributed hash stores are new...

That didn't answer anything. How can you trust the result if anyone can write there. How can you trust the individual store that it doesn't manipulate its contents, etc.

And how would rollover work?

It would wind up being visible to a large chunk of users simultaneously. Furthermore, since we're relying on the wisdom of the crowd rather than a true CA, you'd be able to trust companies' own CAs rather than delegating off to a not-so-trusted third party.

In other words, if someone claiming to be Facebook has told a significant number of people all over the world that Facebook's cert fingerprint is ABCD124, and that fingerprint matches what they're getting presented, it's probably legitimate. We can add additional points for the cert signer being the same one as the previous cert, lack of listing in a CRL, cert transparency logs, etc.

There's no reason this system couldn't bolt on top of the existing CA infrastructure to avoid a bootstrapping problem either.

It adds a probability value into the mix, in other words. That value has always existed, but now we expose it to the user in some way and stop pretending that it does not.

This is what HTTP Public Key Pinning is for; the hash of the public key of the cert tells browsers to not trust a cert for the same domain with a different public key: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16582534

Technically, certificates automatically validated only guarantees that you are on the website that let's encrypt thinks correspond to facebook.com. MiTM state wide could tamper with it

How so?

Presumably, someone could MITM a CA, and get their own domain validated certificate to another site. The cert may protect you from MITM in a coffee shop, but it doesn't necessarily help you against state-level actors.

>The cert may protect you from MITM in a coffee shop, but it doesn't necessarily help you against state-level actors.

I can use HPKP to pin the cert I get from Lets Encrypt; a cert issued for my domain some other way won’t be trusted due to the hash of its public key being different from the one I pinned.

From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key...:

The Public Key Pinning Extension for HTML5 (HPKP) is a security feature that tells a web client to associate a specific cryptographic public key with a certain web server to decrease the risk of MITM attacks with forged certificates.

HPKP makes administration more complicated but if your threat model includes state-level actors, it prevents them from getting a CA to issue a valid certificate for your domain.

Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) has been mandatory for CAs since September 2017; it uses DNS to specify which CAs are allowed to issue certificates for your domain: https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2017/03/13/caa-mandated-by-c....

It's worth noting that Chrome has plans to deprecate header-based pins in a few months and static pins (the ones baked into binaries) at some point after their Certificate Transparency policy covers all non-expired certificates. That'll make Firefox the only mainstream browser with HPKP support. (Mozilla hasn't announced their intentions so far.)

It’s currently standard for CAs to host multiple verifiers in multiple jurisdictions, to reduce the chances of this happening, afaik.

Let's Encrypt is developing this feature but it might be a little premature to call it "standard"—it's not specified in the Baseline Requirements and I'm not sure whether there's any CA that has announced it as a part of all certificate issuance.

Most CAs aren't automated :) I believe any that do ensure that DNS requests are tried from multiple different locations to prevent this happening. Though you're right, the standards haven't caught up yet.

> someone can buy a domain like... googIe.com, get an SSL cert for it, and it's "valid"

Are you sure that all "old school" CAs wouldn't issue a cert for that?

They were never supposed to fight phishing. Domain Validation certificates literally validate… domains, and nothing more.

It would make more sense to prevent googIe.com from existing at the .com registry level, before any TLS is involved.

I wasn't referring to EV certificates, just to verifying simple ownership of the domain for the purposes of MITM and other attacks of that kind. Let's Encrypt would inform you that the page that appears when you visit googIe.com was indeed served by the owner of that domain (barring server compromises or cert leaks, but that's a separate issue). LE and "basic" certificates do not attempt to answer the question of who owns the domain -- that's also an entirely separate problem.

it's possibly a good target for decentralization + multisig. decentralization so a CA never "goes down", multisig so that a certificate needs N signers, thus if a private key gets hacked then the cert isn't compromised. the hard part seems to be verifying the ownership and integrating with the existing web (the oracle problem)

Does LE have a secure and resilient infrastructure? Like they have multiple sites where they can run all operations from in event of a natural disaster, for example. How about in the event of a government that decides to take it over as a part of their national infrastructure, sounds crazy but we're putting a lot of eggs in their basket.

If you renew your LE certs a month before expiry you still have a month to find an alternative solution should let's encrypt blow up.

>I have is that if LE were to essentially "take over" the CA industry, you know, due to being free, and awesome, we'd have a massive single point of failure for the entire Internet's security model.

single point of failure as in, getting hacked and misiussing certificates?

That's one scenario. Or maybe they run out of funding and need to shut down. Maybe they end up needing to shut down an old API before everyone is ready. Maybe they have a bug and issue a bunch of subtly broken certs (say, not enough entropy).

It's a concern whenever a large portion of decentralized infrastructure has a single centralized dependency. Even if that dependency is awesome and doing great work right now.

Ideally, there would be several free CAs that all used the ACME protocol. But somebody's got to pay for that and somebody's got to go through the effort of setting it up when Let's Encrypt already works really well.