Are Some CAs Too Big To Fail?

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 7, 2011 @08:10AM from the they-don't-fall-down dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "In the wake of this weekend's revelations of the seriousness of the attack on certificate authority DigiNotar, security experts have renewed criticism of the Internet's digital certificate infrastructure, with some wondering if larger certificate authorities (CAs) might be too big to fail. Would Mozilla and Microsoft and Google have revoked trust in root certificates from VeriSign or Thawte had they been compromised? Unlikely. 'It's not a simple matter of removing certificates from a database, because they're not in any databases,' says researcher Moxie Marlinspike, who presented an alternative approach to the current SSL infrastructure last month at DEFCON. 'We may never track them all down.'"

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Too big to fail... by houstonbofh · 2011-09-07 08:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

Too big to fail means too big to give a shit. Failure is the motivator for performance. With no cost for bad performance, there is no incentive for good. Just ask the "big" banks, or better yet, ask the customers...