Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

It's reasonable to believe that Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) and traditional RSA will co-exist on the same servers for years, if not decades, during the transition to post quantum cryptography (PQC). Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare joins us in this episode to explore the possibility of quantum downgrade attacks and what we can do about them.

We are joined by Dustin Moody of NIST to go over the current state of the various post quantum cryptography (PQC) contests, including upcoming FIPS standards for Falcon (FN-DSA) and HQC, other Round 4 algorithms, the digital signing algorithm (DSA) On Ramp, isogeny, and future cryptographic exploration.

We are joined by Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare to explain considerations and requirements for use of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). This includes full adoption of TLS 1.3, offering PQC and RSA at the same time, the imperative value of automation, and running production MTC in 2027.

There are strong reasons to believe that the architecture of PQC TLS will take the form of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). We are joined by post quantum cryptography expert Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare as he explains this new PKI architecture, how it works, and why we need it. We define new concepts like landmark certificates and log mirrors and discuss what's necessary to move to this new archite...

We describe three different kinds of logical qubits with their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Jason explains the extreme danger of side channel attacks in the new post quantum cryptography (PQC) era.

The reliability of cryptographic algorithms is largely a matter of conjecture based on track record. Proving security is impaired by the difficulty of formal verification, implementation weaknesses, and failure in randomness.

The first of the five pillars of Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) is discovery. While many of your certificates are easily discoverable, some difficult PKI remains.

The UK Online Safety Act intends to force vendors who sell hardware and software to allow the government to scan end-to-end encrypted communication on end devices. We once again marvel at governments seeking to undermine the security of their own citizens.

Google has taken a strong position supporting Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) as the PQC-enabled future for SSL / TLS. We unpack this extremely important position from the WebPKI's most influential organization.

A new paper from Google Quantum AI and others documents a new technique for breaking ECC, particularly the curve protecting crypto currencies, smart contracts, and blockchain. This accelerates post quantum cryptography (PQC) timelines.

New research suggests that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is achievable with only 10,000 qubits. This was an important contributor to Google moving its PQC target to 2029.

Google has announced that it is moving its target for full PQC support to 2029. This is a strong statement from one of the most knowledgeable PQC technology companies that the existing 2030 target is too late.

Legacy PKI implementations in the enterprise are holding back technical progress and creating security risk. We discuss reasons why, consequences, and what to do about it.

In our previous episode we defined cryptography as the new geopolitics. Now in our 600th episode we follow up to explain how all cryptographic decisions reflect the social, political, and legal viewpoints of the cryptography's designers.

In the last decade or so, nations around the world have become keenly determined to use cryptography for their own legal, economic, and military advantage. We explore this concept.

A recent CISA report declares that the nation's OT infrastructure is incapable of keeping up with the crypto agility and certificate management needs that modern security demands. We examine this finding.

Microsoft has publicly stated that it will hand over Bitlocker keys to US law enforcement agencies without requiring a subpoena or court order. These keys can be held by users rather than Microsoft, at their option. We dive into this topic.

We usually think of Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) as a security category. But we could equally well categorize it as an operations category that enables uptime. In this episode we make our case.

We introduce the concept of a "digital parasite," explaining why this attack philosophy appears to be on the rise.

In a recent blog post Google made five recommendations for policy makers. We walk down the list.

CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) has released new guidance about post-quantum cryptography in critical infrastructure, including some very sobering warnings. We go into the details.

CAA records exist to restrict issuing CAs for a given domain to as few as one CA. But what happens when the CAA record outlives the CA to which it restricts issuance? Join us to find out.

Chrome's deadline for deprecation of the clientAuth EKU and mTLS in public certificates has moved out. We give you the what, when, and why.

It would be easy to believe that the amount of risk posed to the WebPKI by any individual public CA is somehow proportional to the number of active certificates that CA has. This is false, however. In this episode we address this misconception.