Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

Apple has announced it will support Merkle Tree Certificates for PQC and has released a draft root store policy. We share some of the surprising requirements in this draft.

Publicly trusted client authentication certificates have a hard deadline to be deprecated in Q1 2027. Not everyone is ready for that. We discuss some of the reasons why and what to do about it.

The NIST contest has not been the only government-led effort to discover qunatum-resistant algorithms. In this episode we describe South Korea's PQC contest, which is entirely independent of the NIST contest.

In this second of two episodes, we finish our discussion of Scientifically Relevant Quantum Computers (SRQC) and their implications.

We define a new term, Quantum Security Posture Management (QSPM) and explain what it is and why it's important for PQC plans.

Much ado has been made about quantum computers breaking traditional cryptography. But that's not the reason so much effort is going into their creation. In this first of two episodes, we discuss the expected scientific applications for quantum computing architecture and the idea of a Scientifically Relevant Quantum Computer (SRQC).

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is supposed to be this highly secure method of key exchange. But is it as secure as people say? We explore the potential weaknesses with QKD.

We follow up on the recent Mythos attack against PQC candidate HAWK. We discuss the impact of this attack on both HAWK and FALCON.

TLS certificates from CA/Browser Forum CAs are not the only server certificates in the WebPKI. eIDAS QWACs are treated as server certificates by the major browsers. We see clear progress toward post quantum cryptography (PQC) for TLS by way of the Merkle Tree Certificate (MTC) architecture. But what is the path to PQC for eIDAS? We examine this question.

As certificate lifespans become extremely short, new methods of delivery become functionally necessary. We explain RFC 9345 and how delegated credentials play a role in CDNs to deliver very short-lived certificates.

With certificate lifespans shortening, we occasionally run into those who disagree with this trend and seek to lengthen maximum term once again. We examine regressive attitudes in PKI, why they occur, and the reasons that lessening security is generally a bad policy.

X9 is a consortium certificate for interbanking applications. There is a common misunderstanding that X9 certificates are a public-trust surrogate for mTLS using WebPKI certificates. We clarify why this is not the case.

"Chaos engineering" describes the practice of injecting faults into a system to see what happens. This is a known strategy for deterministic systems, but with the advent of non-deterministic AI systems, chaos engineering has taken on greater importance.

Since frontier-model AIs have been trained on a large portion of published human knowledge, widespread publication of incorrect information can taint AI results. As more AI-generated slop finds its way onto the internet, this runs the risk of further poisoning AI results. This ultimately can result in completely unusable information.

It is possible to use common tools like OpenSSL to create your own ML-DSA private CA. This is a great tool for development and research projects, but Jason explains the pitfalls with trying to do this for production systems.

We are replacing RSA with the combination of ML-DSA and ML-KEM. We explain the naming convention and specifically what these two algorithms do.

Jason explains de-quantization, which is the practice of using our knowledge of how to use a quantum computer to reframe problems for processing using traditional computing architecture.

There is no CABF or root program rule preventing public CAs from implementing new requirements earlier than their assigned due dates. We discuss reasons to implement a rule early and how early it should be.

It is surprising that we continue to see root expirations occur at the most inopportune times. Weekends, public holidays, even New Year's Eve. In this episode we have simple advice to anybody setting up a new root, which is "look at a calendar."

SSL hasn't been a standard in use for nearly thirty years, but we still use the word. We discuss why that is, what else we might say, and the expected effect of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) on our technical vocabulary.

With the upcoming deprecation of client authentication using publicly trusted TLS certificates, we go over the common use cases for these certificates. We discuss the reasons public trust is often chosen and how to transition away from it.