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HTTPS Certificate Revocation is broken, and it's time for some new tools

Posted by bob on · 1 comment
Ars Technica; By Scott Helme
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We have a little problem on the web right now and I can only see it becoming a larger concern as time goes by: more and more sites are obtaining certificates, vitally important documents needed to deploy HTTPS, but we have no way of protecting ourselves when things go wrong.

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Comments (1)

Done.

DKIM works this way.... and DKIM along with DNSSEC provides DNS root level security of email servers. The same could easily be implemented with TLS...

It's almost there.

As indicated in the article CAA is a DNS record specifying the CA. There's actually zero difference from a security perspective to simply insert the public key for the server in DNS.

If instead of listing a CA in DNS, the domain owner created a public/private key and inserted the public key in DNS... then CAs go away entirely. Therefore there would be no problem with rogue CAs, because the domain owner would have full control and responsibility over the TLS public/private key. This would also allow key agnostic systems. PGP keys could be used as well as x509 systems.

We'll see if the 'security community' realizes the better solution... but some of my tech managers in prior work experiences were fond of saying that:

"Managing engineers is like herding cats."

So, it may be a long time before the 'experts' realize the better solution to TLS key assurance.

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