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Comment by e28eta | Hacker News Reader

Love this quote:

Inclusion in the Chrome Root Store requires that a CA Owner continuously demonstrate the technical competence and operational rigor necessary to protect Chrome users. Due to the seriousness of this incident, the Chrome Root Program is conducting a thorough evaluation regarding the status of eMudhra’s remaining CA certificate to ensure these standards continue to be met. We will share further updates as our review progresses.

from a post on https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-polic...

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It's been a while since there was a good CA death penalty case.

Given Wayne's hints in the timeline that this issue was discovered by an agent, it might be one of the first big corporate death sentences due to AI?

I bet Entrust never made a cert with a private key of 4.

The problem is the death penalty case is aimed at the wrong target: The entire Web PKI system remains dumb and bad, and the correct answer is to dissolve the CA/B and find people with practical security experience.

Entrust (now Sectigo) is involved with this [0] (cross signed an intermediate) [1] Even last year buying a Sectigo cert got you an Entrust cert with no mention of Sectigo/Comodo[2] (maybe more of a Character.AI situation than a sale)

[0] https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/roots.json

[1] https://www.entrust.com/company/newsroom/entrust-sells-publi...

[2] https://www.sectigo.com/comodo

> Entrust (now Sectigo) is involved with this

This is probably a rough definition for "Entrust was banned from being a CA and sold the business off to a competitor". In part, because I also do not think the root programs would just allow Entrust to continue operating the same business under another brand name, unless they are even dumber than I already thought.

The other solution is web of trust. Which works waaaaay better but is really complicated to implement.

I'm not sure there is a 3rd solution to this.

Given the amount of progress the CAB forum has led in the last decade+, I'm not sure I agree with that diagnosis. Plenty of people in the forum I can think of who have forced positive changes due to the strength of their experience.

If anyone should be navel-gazing coming out of this incident, surely it's the trust store maintainers. If there's a big concrete improvement to be made, short of burning down the web PKI ecosystem, I'm not sure it's obvious yet.

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