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Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly that last paragraph I totally agree. I did edit to “never trust” these clowns’ root CAs in Keychain Access on my Mac, and this is the first I’m hearing that there was any possibility of that being flipped back. Will have to look into that.

If I can speculate though on why these bundles come from the browser or OS and aren’t fully in the user’s responsibility. You’d have to start from scratch for it to not have a bunch of stuff the user had ‘no need for’ to be present, and the user would need to see a cert window semi-frequently that gives the possibility to start trusting a CA, and the bottom 99.99% of users in sophistication has no idea whether they should say yes or no. I mean, without being signed by a root CA you already trust, even the name on the new CA could be completely made up. “Do you want to trust the ‘Apple Root Certificate Authority’?”

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Yet they ask you what keyboard type to use, what Wifi network and password to use. Is it too much to ask, do you want to trust "key authorities" from outside your country? Users used to see computers as inherently technical devices and expect to get asked technical questions.

But even if not, you get asked whether to turn on Siri, whether to send telemetry, whether to sign away your rights, etc., all of which are consequential but prompts are massaged in a way where it's nice and easy for the user to answer a certain way without having a clue. Makes me think user comprehension isn't even a problem.

Where I suspect the problem lies is that it will not fly to make it seem like US-based CA's are more trustworthy just because the majority of sites roll up to them. Then you'll need to do some non-country-specific human tiering, and who's the judge of that?

>do you want to trust "key authorities" from outside your country?

So what happens to americans visiting french sites?

"It seems like you're visiting a site registered in XYZ country. Do you want to start trusting XYZ country key authorities?

[Do Not Trust], [Trust Once], [Trust Forever]"

Then users just proceeds to hit trust for everything, just like people blindly accept ssh keys.

The country comparison doesn't do much either, because there isn't a good guarantee that they'll correspond. Some guy posted a repo to distrust every CA except the top 30, and that has a bunch of weird examples, like a bunch of russian sites being signed by a Greek CA. Not to mention some of the biggest sites use CAs that don't correspond with their country of origin. GlobalSign is Belgian for instance. Guess how many of their customers aren't Belgian?

Isn't the whole point of this to decide what "shady" CA's to trust? If a Russian site bothered to get signed in Greece, some people will trust the site, and some people will distrust the Greek CA's. That's how trust works.

You can add other options too, "Trust for 30 days" or something. I wish SSH known hosts has an auto-expunge.

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