>From >[http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/mozilla-debates-whether-trust-chinese-ca]. Read also [http://lwn.net/Articles/372386/].
===== Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese CA By Ed Felten - Posted on February 16th, 2010 at 2:45 pm Sometimes geeky technical details matter only to engineers. But sometimes a seemingly arcane technical decision exposes deep social or political divisions. A classic example is being debated within the Mozilla project now, as designers decide whether the Mozilla Firefox browser should trust a Chinese certification authority by default. [...] If the CA is competent and honest, then you can rely on the cert, and your connection will be secure. But a dishonest CA can trick you into talking to an impostor site, so you need to be cautious about which CAs you trust. Your browser comes preinstalled with a list of CAs whom it will trust. In principle you can change this list, but almost nobody does. So browser vendors effectively decide which CAs their users will trust. [...] CNNIC's defenders respond that any CA could do such a thing [provide a valid cert for an imposter site]. If the problem is that CNNIC is too close to a government, what about the CAs already on the Firefox CA list that are governments? Isn't CNNIC being singled out because it is Chinese? Doesn't the country with the largest Internet population deserve at least one slot among the dozens of already trusted CAs? These are all good questions, even if they're not the whole story. Mozilla's decision touches deep questions of fairness, trust, and institutional integrity that I won't even pretend to address in this post. No single answer will be right for all users. [...] ===== -- Soh Kam Yung my Google Reader Shared links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16851815156817689753) my Google Reader Shared SFAS links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/16851815156817689753/label/sfas) _______________________________________________ LUGS Mailing list - [email protected] List FAQ: http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq Info page: http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet To unsubscribe send an empty email to: [email protected]
