Trusting the country that operates the ccTLD of your website is a much better situation than having to trust all the countries that have CAs operate in them.
A malicious CA in one country can issue a fraudulent certificate for a site in another country, whereas the people operating .ru can't affect the records for example.us so the blast radius is limited by design.
Moreover, no one is required to use a ccTLD, and there are hundreds of gTLDs to choose from, or you could even run one yourself if necessary.
> A malicious CA in one country can issue a fraudulent certificate for a site in another country, whereas the people operating .ru can't affect the records for example.us so the blast radius is limited by design.
Sure and they'll be quickly mistrusted. You can't really revoke DNNSEC trust of an ccTLD operator.
> Moreover, no one is required to use a ccTLD, and there are hundreds of gTLDs to choose from, or you could even run one yourself if necessary.
> Sure and they'll be quickly mistrusted. You can't really revoke DNNSEC trust of an ccTLD operator.
But you don't have to, because the blast radius is so much smaller, and the incentives are aligned better. The reason why CAs require such extreme punishment for misbehaviour is that one bad CA can break the trust for every site on the web.
If a country decided to invalidate the security of (predominantly) its own citizens' websites then that wouldn't harm anyone who used any of the other ccTLDs in the world (not to mention the hundreds of gTLDs).
Also, I think you are over-estimating the ease with which a CA can be "quickly mistrusted". What is the record for how quickly a CA has been taken out of browsers' certificate stores, measured from the time of their first misissuance?
And I would argue that revoking CA trust to Let's Encrypt / IdenTrust would be much more disruptive than revoking a single ccTLD operator, since that would mean breaking most sites on the web. So DNSSEC is actually better in terms of the "too big to fail" problem.
> This is bypassing a dangerous design, at best.
But that's my point; DNSSEC lets you bypass the danger of a rogue issuer, by swapping to an alternate domain in the worst case, whereas with CAs you have to hope that the rogue issuer doesn't decide to target you, and wait for the bureaucratic and software update processes to remove that CA from all your users' browsers.
There are definitely limitations to the DNSSEC system as currently deployed, just as there were with the web PKI system before browsers started to patch all the holes in that, but I don't know why my position on this technical question is so controversial. Nevertheless, I really appreciate you taking the time to offer intelligent counter-arguments in your comment, thank you.
> But you don't have to, because the blast radius is so much smaller, and the incentives are aligned better.
Entire countries best case is a small blast radius? A small CA going rogue would have a much smaller one, when we're talking about best case. Worst case is massive either way (say LetsEncrypt and .com). People also buy a lot of domains ignoring the fact that they're ccTLDs. The mere implication that people should choose their domains considering this fact is terrible.
> The reason why CAs require such extreme punishment for misbehaviour is that one bad CA can break the trust for every site on the web.
They can, but it'll be discovered really quick, especially with CAA violations. This can't be said about DNSSEC, any key compromise and abuse is difficult if not impossible to detect. Imagine that but with DANE, indefinite MITM, scary.
> DNSSEC lets you bypass the danger of a rogue issuer, by swapping to an alternate domain in the worst case, whereas with CAs you have to hope that the rogue issuer doesn't decide to target you
That's an insane bypass though. "Just cut your arm off, then it won't hurt." Change your email, figure out how to patch millions of devices out in the wild, so many problems.
A rogue issuer is much less hassle short- and long-term to deal with. Most browsers ship CRLite or similar and can revoke the root quickly. You can resume operation with a new CA rather fast.
DNSSEC is a nice complement to WebPKI and vice versa, but for our all sake, it can't be the only source of trust.
A malicious CA in one country can issue a fraudulent certificate for a site in another country, whereas the people operating .ru can't affect the records for example.us so the blast radius is limited by design.
Moreover, no one is required to use a ccTLD, and there are hundreds of gTLDs to choose from, or you could even run one yourself if necessary.