On Feb 14, 2012, at 1:16 23PM, Jon Callas wrote: > > On Feb 14, 2012, at 7:42 AM, ianG wrote: > >> On 14/02/12 21:40 PM, Ralph Holz wrote: >>> Ian, >>> >>> Actually, we thought about asking Mozilla directly and in public: how >>> many such CAs are known to them? >> >> It appears their thoughts were "none." >> >> Of course there have been many claims in the past. But the Mozilla CA desk >> is frequently surrounded by buzzing small black helicopters so it all >> becomes noise. > > I've asked about this, too, and the *documented* evidence of this happening > is exactly that -- zero. > > I believe it happens. People I trust have told me, whispered in my ear, and > assured me that someone they know has told them about it, but there's > documented evidence of it zero times. > > I'd accept a screen shot of a cert display or other things as evidence, > myself, despite those being quite forgeable, at this point. > > Their thoughts of it being none are reasonably agnostic on it. > > Those who have evidence need to start sharing. >
A related question... Sub-CAs for a single company are obviously not a problem. Thus, if a major CA were to issue WhizzBangWidgets a CA cert capable of issuing certificates for anything in *.WhizzBangWidgets.com, it would be seen as entirely proper. The issue is whether or not that sub-CA can issue certificates for, say, google.com. The restriction is enforced by the Name Constraints field in the CA's cert. However, this is seldom-enough seen that I have no idea if it's actually usable. So -- do major cert-accepting programs examine and honor this field, and do it correctly? I know that OpenSSL has some code to support it; does it work? What about Firefox's? The certificate-handling code in various versions of Windows? Of MacOS? --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography