Just some OT thoughts.

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 07:35:19AM -0600, Chris Bennett wrote:
> CA's cannot be trusted to even pay attention to carefully securing
> your certificate.  Here in the US, the government can simply ask for
> your certificate and get it ( and possibly even use it to impersonate
> you)

The government would have the certificate, but not the private key, so
I'm not sure how they can impersonate you with it.

However, they can just get their own key to *any* shoddy CA included in
browsers, and get a certificate linking that key to your services
without much problem.

The problem is not really whether there is a trust relationship between
your CA provider and you, it's whether at least *one* CA is laxist
enough that they give out certificates without thorough checking.

Even with your self-signed approach, somebody could get a CA to issue a
certificate that their key is good for your website, and impersonate it
to any of your new-coming customers who haven't been exposed to your
official key yet.

I may also be wrong in my analysis, but as far as my understanding goes,
it's correct.

--
Olivier Mehani <sht...@ssji.net>
PGP fingerprint: 4435 CF6A 7C8D DD9B E2DE  F5F9 F012 A6E2 98C6 6655

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