Re: Russia attempts mandating installation of root CA on clients for TLS MITM

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Sun, 13 Mar 2022, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> Oh.
> Your message started insightful.
> Now you are back to binary authorization, just with a jurisdiction parameter going in.

Public CAs are third-party introducers.  Its like a friend of a friend of 
a friend sets you up on a blind date.  Your friend's friend's friend may 
mean well, but your shouldn't rely on them for authentication or 
authorization of the trustworthiness of the person on the date.

Just read the disclaimers of liability in every public CA statement of 
practices. The CAs 'customer' is the purchaser of the certificate, not an 
end-user.

Private CAs are a different matter.  Sometimes (frequently) people confuse 
their relationships between public CAs versus private CAs. Admitly 
public CA marketing departments encourage that confusion. The legal folks 
call it "puffery."

Netscape's original engineering goal was convincing the public it was 
safe to use credit cards for ecommerce sites on the mid-1990s Internet.
If you saw a padlock icon it was "safe" to enter your credicate number. Of 
course, people immediately started putting padlock icons on web pages :-(

Authentication/authorization about an end-user's relationship with a 
public CA is mostly mumbo-jumbo.  The public also gets confused by the 
role of notary publics, bearer instruments, cashiers cheques, 
pen-and-paper signatures, and old fashion wax seals. Con artists have 
taken advantage of that misplaced trust for hundreds of years.