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482 points sanqui | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.806s | source
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danpalmer ◴[] No.42285229[source]
This is a bad look. I expected the result would be Chrome and Firefox dropping trust for this CA, but they already don't trust this CA. Arguably, Microsoft/Windows trusting a CA that the other big players choose not to trust is an even worse look for Microsoft.
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jsheard ◴[] No.42285389[source]
What is even the point of a web CA that isn't trusted by all of the major players? Is there one?
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tialaramex ◴[] No.42285444[source]
These are generally government CAs, so, typically the situation is Microsoft sold the government Windows, and as part of that deal (at least tacitly) agreed to the CA being trusted, and so every system that's trusting these certificates is a Windows PC anyway, running Edge because the whole point was the government will only use Windows and pays Microsoft $$$.

Why bake it into everybody else's Windows? If you make say a Brazil Government-only Windows which trusts this CA instead, I guarantee somebody crucial in Brazil will buy a 3rd party Windows laptop independently and it doesn't work with this CA's certificates and that ends up as Microsoft's problem to fix, so, easier to just have every Windows device trust the CA.

They'll have an assurance from the CA that it won't do this sort of crap, and that's enough, plausible deniability. Microsoft will say they take this "very seriously" and do nothing and it'll blow over. After all this stuff happened before and it'll happen again, and Windows will remain very popular.

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awinter-py ◴[] No.42285561[source]
what's the state's interest in having their CA built into windows?
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1. tsimionescu ◴[] No.42286935[source]
So that they don't depend on anyone else to have proper TLS for their state sites and for companies operating in their state.

Imagine if you don't have a state CA, and your relationship with the USA goes sour, and the USA prohibits all of their major CAs from doing business with your country, including Let's Encrypt. People in your country still use the internet and you still want to protect them from scammers pretending to be local businesses online. So it's important that you as the state can provide CA services and sign those certificates yourself.

Of course, in this scenario you wouldn't want to be relying on Microsoft to help. But the general principle is that any state who can afford it has a strategic interest in having fully self-sufficient Internet infrastructure, including DNS, CAs, IP allocation etc.

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2. withinboredom ◴[] No.42287706[source]
This seems like a matter of signing a certificate signed by an actual CA with your own CA as well. If the relationship sours, you still have your own CA to vouch for it.
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3. tsimionescu ◴[] No.42294433[source]
That doesn't achieve anything at a country level if trust stores don't include your CA directly. A country can't just push an update to all its citizens' computers to switch CA, it has to plan ahead for such eventualitites.