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Comment by stephbook | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. But the Java keystore and the Firefox/Chrome/VSCode NSSDB and whatever Python is shipping this week aren't really better.

I wonder what's so annoying about OS certs.

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I really appreciate Firefox to have their own certificate DB because it allows to create separate profiles with different trusted certificate sets. The country where I live issued it's own root certificates which I have reasons not to trust in all cases but when accessing government services etc. So I've created a separate Firefox profile where I've installed those malicious certificates, keeping the main Firefox profile clean.

It's nice that firefox implemented that but it's the wrong place to do it IMO. It's the sort of thing that should be built into the OS along with fine grained permissions and sandboxing. The browser is merely providing a bandaid over a deficiency.

Yes, as I understand it, this sort of problem is what “Name Constraints”[0] were designed to solve. (Well, really, they were intended to be used with corporate internal CAs[1], but there's no reason they wouldn't work more broadly, too.)

[0]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5280/#section-4.2.1.10 [1]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TLSInternalCAN...

At least it kind of makes for them specifically, since Netscape did SSL initially before OSes had that functionality. Their mailing list, as far as I know, is still the canonical place for public discussion about the infrastructure.

Firefox is a browser so it make sense to implement their TLS like that.

But we're talking about a lib of a programming language here, things happened in there effects your own reputation when you ship something built on top of it.

So the real question is, has others such as OpenSSL done the same? If yes, then yeah it's normal, but if no then I don't trust people from Google.

It's mostly historical. They used to suck in the past, but the implementations remain. Nowadays you are better off configuring to use OS certificates if possible.

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