delegating SSL certificates

[Jon Callas]

On Mar 16, 2008, at 8:50 AM, John Levine wrote:

>>> So at the company I work for, most of the internal systems have
>>> expired SSL certs, or self-signed certs.  Obviously this is bad.
>>
>> You only think this is bad because you believe CAs add some value.
>
> Presumably the value they add is that they keep browsers from popping
> up scary warning messages.  There are all sorts of reasonable
> arguments to be made that the browsers are doing the wrong thing (and
> the way that Microsoft prevents you from ever deleting any of their
> preinstalled CA certs is among the wrongest.)

Yes, but.

If a browser handled unknown certificates similarly to the way SSH  
does -- to alert the user when it sees an unknown, unrooted  
certificate, and then only again when there is a mis-match, you would  
have an incentive to get a CA certificate (because businesses don't  
want their customers to see that scary message even once), while  
supporting ad-hoc infrastructures.

This would require only software changes, not changes in the trust  
models, CAs, procedures, etc.

A wicked person would suggest that this is because the present system  
was designed to support the business model, not the security model.  
I'm not a wicked person and would never suggest that.

	Jon

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