[Cryptography] The EFF 650 CAs lie

[Ben Laurie]

On Wed, 29 Apr 2020 at 20:44, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at hallambaker.com>
wrote:

> Ideally, an intermediate issuer would be constrained using PKIX
> constraints. Unfortunately, the PKIX specification and the Apple
> implementation make that impossible as some idiot thought it a good idea to
> require constraints be marked critical (i.e. use the break if the extension
> is not understood feature) and Apple's browser didn't understand them at
> the time. One of the sad mistakes in PKIX was giving the criticality flag a
> name that caused people to mistake it for meaning 'this is very very
> important'. It means nothing of the sort it means 'break everything if this
> is not understood'. And it should never be used unless failing to
> understand an extension would cause an invalid cert to be considered valid.
>

Which is exactly why constraints had to be critical.
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