alt Hacker NewsWeb PKI is cursed. Why should anyone have to ship a new version of Go, Electron, webpki-roots, etc. (possibly over a now-compromised TLS connection!) just to revoke a certificate? Why are so many packages independently shipping high-sensitivity trust-bootstrap credentials? And why can any CA still vouch for any domain instead of each being limited to a specific ccTLD or other non-total shard of subject names?
Also, it's quietly, in the email space, that we're seeing real innovation while browser vendors just say "no" to everything. We should be distributing trust, not centralizing it in browser vendor security teams and Let's Encrypt.
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What's worse is, if this hadn't come to light, how would you even know when an attacker issues a cert for your domain?
Well you might think, oh I can monitor the certificate transparency logs.
I would say well, good luck downloading and parsing terabytes of certificates as they are logged. Then there are CAs whose logs will rate limit you in a way such that you can't catch up to the certs being logged with one server and IP. The system might "work" but not for domain owners. Good luck.
> Also, it's quietly, in the email space, that we're seeing real innovation […]
Can you elaborate on this innovation in the email space around PKI?
Web PKI doesn't mandate that every client ship with its own root certs. The clients you listed can be configured to use a centrally managed trust store, if that's what you want. The fact that they don't by default is a deliberate tradeoff that the clients made, not some standard's fault.