Russia attempts mandating installation of root CA on clients for TLS MITM

Fri Mar 11 00:35:48 UTC 2022

On Thu, 10 Mar 2022, Eric Kuhnke wrote:
> I think we'll see a lot more of this from authoritarian regimes in the
> future. For anyone unfamiliar with their existing distributed DPI
> architecture, google "Russia SORM".

Many nation's have a government CA.

The United States Government has its Federal Public Key Infrastructure, 
and Federal Bridge CA.

https://playbooks.idmanagement.gov/fpki/ca/

If you use DOD CAC ID's or FCEB PIV cards or other federal programs, your 
computer needs to have the FPKI CA's.  You don't need the FPKI CA's for 
other purposes.

Some countries CA's issue for citizen and business certificates.

While X509 allows you to specify different CA's for different purposes, 
since the days of Netscape, browsers trust hundreds of root or bridged CA 
in its trust repository for anything.

Neither commercial or government CA's are inherently more (or less) 
trustworthy.  There have been trouble with CA's of all types.

A X509 certificate is a big integer number, in a fancy wrapper.  Its not a 
magical object.