alt Hacker NewsOk, but the analogy was wrong anyway.
> random banks and IT companies in the world holds the secret codes to everyone's encryption.
That's not true at all.
What they do have is the power to MITM connections IF they first spook DNS or insert themselves into a proxy accepted by the server somehow.
So, if you want to be honest, the original sentence becomes:
> random banks and IT companies in the world holds secret codes that are trusted by everyone to sign information that is used to establish trusted communications. If they wanted to, they could try to tamper with people's network connections and, if successful somehow, pretend to be anyone else that had used their secret codes to sign their information.
Quite a big difference, no?
That sentence doesn’t take the current situation into account. It’s not just “they” - the CA - that can do this, it’s anyone who can figure out their weak encryption key. Which makes the “if successful somehow” a whole lot more likely - consider what malware distributors can do with this, for example.