[Discuss] root CA bloat

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/22/2014 5:33 AM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>>
>> You are conflating DNS and Certificate Authorities.   When I look at
>> the certificate used
>> for www.microsoft.com, it appears to be signed by Symantec via
>> Verisign.   In any case, controlling someone's DNS is not the same
>> thing as being able to sign an SSL certificate that will be accepted.
>
>
> MarkMonitor is a trusted CA. If they generate a certificate for
> microsoft.com then your browser will trust it. MarkMonitor is authoritative
> for the microsoft.com domain. They can change all microsoft.com hosts to
> point to their servers and you will trust them because their DNSSEC
> signatures are good and valid.

I already mentioned part of this in my first note.  They would have to
do it by changing the nameserver entries for the microsoft.com domain
at the .com DNS servers which I'm pretty sure they don't run.   This
would be visible to the whole world.   So yes, they could do this; but
I'm pretty sure it would be found out because the bad data would be
sitting in everybody's caching servers as well as the databases at the
.com servers which are run by multiple organizations.   I'm pretty
sure they would then lose every customer they had within a few days or
weeks.   This is not a scenario that I'm going to lose sleep over.  If
you have some other scenario that doesn't involve putting MarkMonitor
out of business
please provide details.

Bill