This is being read as good news, as Mozilla sticking up for its own users by enforcing a new control on its CAs. But what it actually reads like to me is a surrender. For once, I'll line up with the howl- at- the- moon crowd and say that, excepting the fact that Mozilla might have been boxed into a corner here, this is a bit of a travesty.

What you're not getting in this story is the following set of facts:

* A Mozilla-approved CA appears to have sold one of its customers a CA=YES cert --- in other words, they sold one of their customers the ability to be a CA.

* The customer wanted the cert to implement a "data loss protection" system. These are systems that either sit on the network or on everyone's machine and scan traffic to make sure people aren't exfiltrating company secrets. DLP systems want to see inside of SSL/TLS traffic.

* You don't need a CA cert to look inside the SSL/TLS traffic of your users. What you're meant to do is, create your own self-signed CA root certificate and install it yourself in all your users' browsers. Yes, this is painful.

* So instead of incurring that pain, this particular company got a CA to, in effect, install that certificate in the browser of every computer on the Internet. That they didn't intend to MITM the traffic of every one of those computers is beside the point.

* Instead of the exact audit and certification process used by Mozilla to add new CAs, this chained sub-CA was audited by the CA itself. But: before you say, "well at a minimum you'd hope the CA audited them!", you should know: the primary business of this particular CA is auditing.

* The CA didn't appear to have told anyone this for a long time (I want to be careful to point out that I don't know exactly what the timelines are here; from the CRLs, it doesn't look great).

* Something happened that caused the CA to announce that they had issued the cert.

* A long discussion happened on Mozilla Bugzilla, under a critical security blocker bug that more or less requested that the CA be removed from Firefox.

* Publicly, the policy response from Mozilla was, "they came forward, and removing their cert from the roots is an extreme punishment". I think behind the scenes, getting rid of this CA was problematic for other (valid) reasons.

* So instead, stern letter to all the CAs. Yay! The Internet is safe again.

I don't know how much more cut-and-dry an abuse of the CA system you can get than selling your CA status to random unnameable companies so that they can implement MITM systems.

But more than that: it is simply batshit crazy that CAs are allowed to sell CA=YES certs at all. I don't get it. Maybe someone working at a browser vendor can reply to this comment and explain to us why any one company is trusted to make a decision like that for the entire Internet?

I am a vocal and public fan of SSL/TLS, and I've even on occasion stuck up for X.509 (horrid as this certificate format is). But this stuff here is the part of the SSL/TLS system that the privacy zealots are right about. I'm hopeful that we'll see adoption of a system like Moxie Marlinspike proposed with "Convergence", where instead of blindly accepting Mozilla's policy decisions (and updating our policies once- in- a- blue- moon), we'll have end-user-selectable trust roots and thus an incentive for someone (maybe the EFF) to do a good job running such a root. I'm also hopeful that at some point we'll manage to figure out a UX for website trust that is better than what we came up with in 1997.