| ▲ | Ask HN: Books/guides/resources about running a public, web CA? |
| 12 points by _1tan 13 hours ago | 6 comments |
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| ▲ | cpach 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think the below resources are a good start. This makes me curious: Do you have a specific goal in mind? https://github.com/mozilla/pkipolicy https://www.ccadb.org/ https://cabforum.org/ |
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| ▲ | _1tan 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Indeed I do. We run a SaaS in a regulated industry, mainly in Germany. To receive and transmit certain payloads we need to use dedicated TLS certificates from a government run PK infrastructure (Search for "Smart-Meter PKI" if you are curious). We want to become a sub-CA of this PKI and while we are aware of the policies of this specific PKI, we think that from an engineering or IT ops standpoint we can learn much more from web PKI CAs. |
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| ▲ | threesevenths 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The difficult part of running a ca is convincing others you’re trustworthy. You need to have your business processes audited but an independent third party and then wait for your root to be adopted and deployed in browsers. The value in exiting providers is their reach; versign for example is deployed in practically every trusted root bundle. When GoDaddy wanted to enter the market, they bought Starfield who already had a root which was widely trusted and crossed that with their own. The reason people will pay for you to compute a number based on a number they give you and your super secret number is that people trust what you’re doing with your super secret number. And that trust takes time. |
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| ▲ | viraptor 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And when you want to run a public one, you should learn at least everything that cacert did. They tried hard and still never got included. https://www.cacert.org/ That effort seems to be dying and it's been years since anyone asked me to authenticate them. Some history here. http://wiki.cacert.org/InclusionStatus And that's before root stores had to deal with Honest Achmed's Used Cars and Certificates. | |
| ▲ | solardev 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How did LetsEncrypt get acceptance everywhere? | | |
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