That's a good reason why you should be careful about which CA you trust!
But without openness how do we know a good one from a bad one, I think Ian made this comment, that all documents submitted to the Mozilla inclusion process should be opened up for users to be able to make their own decisions about CA's...
If some government was doing what you propose, it would be possible to notice it - if anyone checked the cert chain during SSL connections manually (or even programmatically, with a bot). I'm not saying it would instantly get noticed, but it would get noticed eventually.
I think you slightly missed my point, issuing duplicate certificates for the most part would be real would have been requested and wouldn't be as easily detected by bots or humans alike, the browser wouldn't pop up a message and you would have to carefully scrutinise all key fingerprints with originals, and if the original reported by the CA is in fact the duplicate basically no one would have any chance to verify against anything, this goes if it was a commercial CA, or a CA setup by a government for snooping purposes...
Then of course this could lead on to DNS being hijacked and all sorts of messy things, it might get picked up, but I highly doubt it...
If it was a rogue CA, there should be a process to remove it. Hopefully it should lose its certification and simply be removed. If not, it would be easy to prove by collecting a number of the "proxy" certs under false identities, and contact the owner in the subject certs to see if they actually requested the cert and have the private key.
With all the DNS hijacking that took place last decade and all the countries that exist in the world I'm assuming it wouldn't be difficult at all to dupe a CA, how many would care to verify? After all it only takes one and the whole thing comes crashing down, which is why Ian has been pimping the idea on branding so much, then it's explicitly out in the open as to who issued the certificate. Perhaps he doesn't go far enough, perhaps when the logo is clicked on another window should open up with a brief run down on how that CA issues certificates, then again, very few would read the fine print until after the fact and they're looking to sue someone...
However, under your proposal, if everybody uses self-signed certs, there is never any way to do any meaningless identity check at all, so there is never any way to tell, now or ever, if your party is who they claim.
Nope I'm not proposing self-signed, that was Ian. I am however starting to see why the PGP and other webs of trust have a lot more value then any CA can offer if implemented and adhered to in a strict manner... Which by the way is how CAcert.org operates, but everything that has been discussed in this list points more and more away from existing CAs, CAcert may not be the answer but the current system is so far flawed it's not likely to work either...
Then again I doubt most people would care if the browser was changed to include CA logo to increase value add, but that's for marketing departments I guess, at the end of the day no matter how much you attempt to educate people, they truly are the weakest link in any security you can come up with...
Note that nobody precludes you from using your own self-signed certs today. You just get a warning in the browser about the authentication, which I think is very fair. You can still use encryption if you are brave enough to ignore that warning.
A lot of people would ignore it, they get so many messages they don't care what they click on, the virus's that exploit human ignorance is testimony to that...
-- Best regards, Duane
http://www.cacert.org - Free Security Certificates http://www.nodedb.com - Think globally, network locally http://www.sydneywireless.com - Telecommunications Freedom http://happysnapper.com.au - Sell your photos over the net! _______________________________________________ mozilla-crypto mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-crypto
