this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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Hi,

If you don't know how work the chain of trust for the httpS

You might want to watch this video https://invidious.privacydev.net/watch?v=qXLD2UHq2vk ( if you know a better one I'm all ears )

So in my point of view this system have some huge concerns !

  1. You need to relies to a preinstalled store certificate in your system or browser... Yeah but do you know those peoples ??!! it might seem weird, but actually you should TRUST people that YOU TRUST/KNOW !!

Here an extract from the certificate store om Firefox on Windows.

I do not know ( personally ) any of those COMMERCIAL company !

  1. Of course we could use Self-certificate but this is not protecting against Man-in-the-middle_attack . Instead of using a chain (so few 3th party involved , so increasing the attack surface ! ) why not using something simpler !? like for example
  • a DNS record that hold the HASH of the public key of the certificate of the website !
  • a decentralized or federated system where the browser could check those hash ?

Really I don't understand why we are still using a chain of trust that is

  1. not trusted
  2. increase the surface of attack
  3. super complex compare to my proposals ?

Cheers,

Why I don't use the term SSLBecause actually httpS now use TLS not anymore ssl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  1. How would you verify the DNS records? Dnssec?
  2. How would a federated or decentralized system be able to establish trust?

Your proposals aren't thought through. I'm not a huge fan of the current system, especially government mandated certificates without a public certificate transparency log, but if you think a different decentralized system will somehow be more trustworthy then I have a bridge to sell you.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for you reaction @[email protected]

  1. Yes trough Dnssec, or something else ?

  2. Maybe we should go toward a blockchain ? but maybe it's overkill ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Just promote DANE. You could even use self-signed certificates considered as trusted because they are set in a DNSSEC-signed TLSA Resource Record for a host, protocol and port. Unfortunately, end-user software adoption is not the best currently.