On 30/08/11 17:46, Boris Zbarsky wrote: > I was looking at our CA root list, and a lot of them seem like > "specialist" CAs that would only issue certs for a limited range of > hostnames. Could we formalize this, and have CAs indicate any such > restrictions as part of their application, then enforce it on our end?
There is a way to encode this in certificates, called basicConstraints, although I suspect very few CAs do that. (Why limit your market?) I guess NSS could have a feature to impose them on a CA from outside. > That would limit the extent to which a compromise of one of these > "specialist" CAs could be exploited (e.g. we'd notice that a Dutch CA is > being used to sign the Mossad's website and cry foul, without > pre-pinning the CA for the presumably rarely visited Mossad site). Just because they are a Dutch CA doesn't mean they are necessarily only working with Dutch sites. Verisign/Symantec is an American CA. We don't want to put ourselves in a position of entrenching incumbents. In addition, even a CA focussed only on Dutch _companies_ would want to issue certs for .com, because I'm sure a lot of Dutch companies have ..com sites. Given that the aim would be to prevent them issuing bogus certs for mozilla.org, paypal.com, twitter.com etc., I'm not sure many of them We did consider imposing such a restriction for government CAs, on the basis that the audit rules relating to them are necessarily different. > Has this been considered before? Is my assumption that a lot of the CAs > in our trust list would only issue to a small subset of possible > hostnames accurate? It is, but perhaps not in a useful way which allows us to contain risk. :-| Gerv _______________________________________________ dev-security mailing list dev-security@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security
