F-Droid site certificate expired

Because those ephemeral LE certificates are such a great idea...

DANE would be better than LE, but weirdly the massive companies building browsers don't want to provide support. Spooky!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...

DANE is not a good idea. It makes DNS the CA. DNS doesn't have any stringent security requirements to its design or operation, as CAs do. It depends on a problematic protocol (that, among other things, limits the ability to deal with different operational and failure modes). And just because a nameserver provides a record, doesn't mean an authorized domain owner wanted that record to be an authorized secure transport. (not to mention, it would force people choose domain TLDs based on political positions, rather than, say, a desire for an easy to remember name)

It's weak security and introduces more problems than it solves. If we're going to get rid of CAs, we should consider a better solution, not a worse one.

No, it doesn't. It makes the registrar the CA. Which makes sense, they already authorize who owns which domain. They should absolutely do so cryptographically in some fashion.

What's weird is that the major registrars never even tried to enter the PKI business. It would have made sense. It would even have hastened the adoption of much needed TLS extensions.

The registrar is not equivalent to a CA in DANE.

- A CA validates requests, signs CSRs, publishes cert revocation, issues certificates and trust anchors.

- A registrar in DANE merely passes a DS record you created to the TLD, along with the promise that this record was created by the domain zone owner. It's basically the validation step. Nothing to do with establishing or securing data, key/record management, etc; they're a glorified FTP tool.

I'm in favor of registrars getting more involved (since they are the authority on who controls a domain), but only with a completely different design. I have suggested many times that CAs establish an API to communicate directly with Registrars to perform the validation step, as this would eliminate 95% of attacks on Web PKI without introducing any downsides. So far my pleas have fallen on deaf ears. And since the oligopoly of browser vendors continue their attacks on system reliability (via ridiculous expiration times) without any real pushback, I don't see it changing.