Or, as you said, being able to subscribe to other recommendations would be cool.
China, Iran, etc. don't want direct attribution.
To my knowledge, Italy has never been part of the Eastern Block.
EDIT: Looks like you can - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2402121/within-a-web-bro...
The other part would be creating a way/file-format for experts to provide information about which CAs they trust and which are suspicious, then let the extension consume those.
It's not as good as built-in browser support, but it's a heck of a lot faster and more do-able.
just like microsft didn't want windows users to be able set a different default browser...
Nothing is more embarrassing than getting caught with your fingers in the cookie jar.
Besides I trust CAs will be de-listed if proven compromised.
The attacker doesn't even need to compromise a CA.
If someone hijacks the IP address of example.com, he could easily get a valid Let's Encrypt certificate for that domain.
If you're a larger outfit you should pick a trustworthy CA vendor or (two independent vendors according to your risk management profile), and lock CAA to those trusted vendors. You can then agree whatever terms suit your business on top of the Ten Blessed Methods, so as to avoid bad guys stealing your names. For example Facebook has an agreement with their chosen CA that all facebook.com and fb.com issuances get signed off by Facebook's network security people. No "But I'm the head of Asian marketing! I need this immediately" bullshit, it gets a sign off from netsec or it doesn't get issued.
Unfortunately, the mechanism which replaced it (Expect-CT) can only help after the fact - someone would have to notice the extra issuance, and you would have no idea whether your traffic was affected.
Anyway, redirecting and sniffing traffic is one thing, intercepting and changing encrypted traffic while being undetected is another. It’s quite a stretch really.
Not because I don't trust it, but I might because Bruce doesn't. At least, if Bruce stops trusting it I'd like to know why before I decide to trust it again.
I think if you imagine the way that compromised CAs would be used in actual attacks it is clear why we can't expect compromised CAs to be widely observed (they would be used only for targeted traffic), and why we should not trust all CAs equally.
For instance say you want to go to example.com, and it says “you need to trust X CA”. Ignoring that a user doesn’t know what that even means, all of history demonstrates that a user’s goal when encountering a barrier in the way of something they want is to get rid of the barrier. Arguing for user education isnt the right response because technology needs to be designed to work with humans, not the other way round.
Instead we defer to groups like the various CARB orgs to ensure that the trust stores contain only robust CAs. Historically there have been few teeth as evicting CAs from the truststores is hard - look at how long the Symantec distrust is taking, and look at how many people (incl. HN commenters) have argued against it.
That said the addition of things like CT logs has finally given trust stores a view into what is being issued, so can finally detect poorly run CAs at the time that screw up, rather than maybe catching them months later, if at all. That then provides the evidence needed to justify distrusting a ca or auditor.
That is all a large amount of exceedingly technical work, that no regular user could hope to grasp and make a reasonable choice about.
Instead the market pressure is as it should be for CAs now: ensure you are following the rules, or risk distrust. That is pretty much the most effective market pressure you can have in the CA market.
having to manually select/add CAs is akin to not having ssl and using pgp everywhere. and you know how well that works out even for technical folks.
I realize the desire to control my own security is thought by browser-makers to be the death of ecommerce.
I still want it.
What happens when some 20 year old gets their first computer, it doesn’t have any CAs in the trust store so how do they find the good ones? How do they know what the good ones are?
You think you want it, but you don’t necessarily know which CAs are good - have you read all the audits (which you can only trust if you got over tls, which requires you trust it).
What happens when you get a site saying “you need to trust ‘Google CA 1’/‘LetsEncrypt’” (or whatever their public CA is). I’m joking of course - the name is meaningless - there’s no root of trust to verify that it’s not someone making a certificate that just claims to be that CA. So you actually need to know the public key for each CA that you think is trustworthy.
Actual experts aren't respected by the general population enough for this to be a net positive change is my guess.
Every time I bring up the following point someone chimes in that it's a bad idea, but I still fail to understand why it's not easy to pick which CAs I want to trust by picking a list of entities/people I trust and then adopting their recommendations for which CAs to trust.
This would be a few clicks of UI to let me be intelligently paranoid while maintaining only a layperson's understanding of why (say) Bruce Schneier decides to trust some and not others.