> It's strictly worse than this.

Maybe if people implemented name constraints and the CA/B forced CAs to use them. But not as it is; unconstrained sub-CAs are a scourge on the Web PKI.

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agwa a day ago | parent | next [-]

Name constraints are intended for organizations which want to issue publicly-trusted certificates for their own domains. Name constraints are already widely supported and name constrained sub-CAs exist for this purpose in the WebPKI.

eMudhra is not such a case. They are a root CA that issues certificates to the general public all over the world. In fact, they are now the preferred vendor for numerous US universities via InCommon[1]. There is no way to meaningfully name constrain them.

[1] https://incommon.org/certificates

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tptacek a day ago | parent [-]

Can you share any insight about how an Indian CA became the preferred vendor for US universities despite the existence of LetsEncrypt? I know this is kind of a dumb question.

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agwa a day ago | parent [-]

I had a friend who worked in university IT and I got the impression that there was a strong desire to use "supported" products (in general, not just certificates) even if it cost money and was worse than free alternatives.

Interestingly, InCommon used Sectigo prior to this year. I'm guessing eMudhra costs less.

	▲	icedchai a day ago \| parent [-]
		I often run into larger entities that would prefer to use $expensive_cert_vendor instead of the automated certificate services built into the cloud platform they're already using (AWS, GCP.) They really enjoy those manual IT processes or using some third party thing to achieve the same result.

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tptacek a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I like constraints too, but listen carefully to EKR and 'agwa on this, because a lot of things that seem like straightforward fixes are much more complicated in reality. The most important thing I want from the WebPKI is expensive entry and the death penalty for fuckups, and I think we basically have that now.