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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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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, the CA system is broken, but it's what we've got for now. It |
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seems obvious that including fewer CA roots in our base package is a |
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better solution than including more of them, since (a) it's pretty |
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easy for our users to install more of them, including at scale (via an |
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overlay), and (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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Speaking of which, say what you will about Mozilla's broken criteria |
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for root inclusion, but Mozilla has no commercial interests, pretty |
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competent security staff, and is already spending lots of staff time |
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at managing their selection of CA roots. So I think we could do worse |
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than tracking them closely (and in fact, I'd say we *are*, currently |
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doing just that -- doing worse). |
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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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Cheers, |
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Dirkjan |
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