Paul Hoffman wrote:
Yes, but by doing so we aren't in the business of keeping secret data. Our lists are public and can be downloaded, used, modified, etc. by anyone, without providing the attacker the ability to subvert the entire system.At 3:25 PM +0200 10/24/08, Ian G wrote:Robert Relyea wrote:The problem with this idea is that mozilla probably does not want to be in the CA business. The overhead of creating a mozilla root key in a safe and secure manner is quite involved (and more than doing a key gen on a smart card).Yes, I see that. To which I'd add, my feeling of the PKIX-layer solution is equally non-confident: adding root-revocation capability is likely to be a mess.Robert: you are already in that business by distributing trust anchors that you have (sometimes) vetted. You are a CA without signing anything, just by distributing a trust anchor repository.
Going to to the cross cert idea has lots of appeal to me, but the biggest down side is Mozilla would need to protect a private key to at least the level CA's in our list protect their root keys. The likelihood of Mozilla accidentally divulging that private key is much higher than the chances of one of our CA's divulging their root keys (and the solution is basically the same -- update to a new version of mozilla with a new root).
That takes on a much bigger operational burden than mozilla currently has, and bigger than mozilla has to date been willing to take on.
bob
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