On Wed, 05 Oct 2022 13:39:32 +1100
"Martin Thomson" <[email protected]> wrote:

> The integrity of TLS doesn't depend on the key holder presenting
> proof of possession toward the issuing CA.  Perhaps we could define
> an extension that produced an empty signature, so that it could be
> used for any algorithm without these complications...

You are of course right that from the basic security properties of TLS
there is no need for a certificate requester to show key possession.
However I always considered this self-signature a kind of safeguard
that will in practice prevent a number of issues:
* People don't understand how keys and certificates work and will use a
  public key from someone else.
* It will likely prevent various kinds of malformed or corrupted keys
  to be present in certificates that are unable to generate valid
  signatures.

I find these desirable features that likely let things fail early in
various situations where things go wrong.

-- 
Hanno Böck
https://hboeck.de/

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