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On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 5:51 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman <djc@g.o> wrote: |
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> On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 1:44 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote: |
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>> The certificates that Gentoo distributes have at least been vouched |
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>> for by somebody who is a part of our community, which is more than can |
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>> be said for most of the upstream certificates. |
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> |
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> And you think "vouched for" by some community member is better than |
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> Mozilla's audit process, however limiting it may be? |
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Yes. It certainly is no worse. To date I'm not aware of a single |
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security incident involving a certificate introduced by a Gentoo |
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maintainer, but I'm certainly aware of a few involving |
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Mozilla-originated certs. |
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> (b) actual security of a CA probably goes down |
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> exponentially as you move towards CA's with a lower level of trust |
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> placed in them by organizations like Mozilla. |
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Care to substantiate that claim? The fact that Mozilla trusts a |
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certificate does not confer security in and of itself. |
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> IMO it would probably be good to limit our CA roots to Mozilla's |
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> libnss selection by default and perhaps add a packaged selection of |
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> secondary CA's (like CACert) for those who are so inclined. And if |
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> Debian's process is somewhat broken, it might be best to try not to |
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> rely on them. It can't be too hard, if Mozilla is already packaging |
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> the certificates somehow. |
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I've yet to see any evidence that Debian's process is broken. There |
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is simply the claim that Mozilla's process is somehow better. |
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I could see the logic in requiring regular Gentoo audits for any |
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certificates we bundle, in which case we likely wouldn't be bundling |
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any certificates at all (and would be stripping any provided by |
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upstream). However, the only thing following the Mozilla process |
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ensures is that a few commercial entities make lots of money (even if |
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Mozilla isn't one of them). For a company with deep pockets like |
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Mozilla I can see why they do this - even if it provides no security |
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they can just say they're doing what everybody else is doing and it |
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will likely hold up in court. The appearance of security matters more |
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than actual security to them. |
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Rich |
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