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All the time. Many CA distrust events involved some degree of “amateurs” reporting issues. While I hesitate to call commenters like agwa an amateur, it certainly was not professionally sponsored work by root programs or CAs. This is a key thing that Certificate Transparency enables: amateurs, academics, and the public at large to report CA issues.

At the same time, it sounds like the issues you describe aren’t CA/issuance issues, but rather, simple misconfigurations. Those aren’t incidents for the ecosystem, although definitely can be disruptive to the site, but I also wouldn’t expect them to call trust or identity into disrepute. That’d be like arguing my drivers license is invalid if I handed you my passport; giving you the wrong doc doesn’t invalidate the claims of either, just doesn’t address your need.



it seems more ad-hoc, bounty-driven , rather than systematic. is that a fair perspective?


I wish there were bounties :-)

There is systematic checking - e.g. crt.sh continuously runs linters on certificates found in CT logs, I continuously monitor domains which are likely to be used in test certificates (e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1496088), and it appears the Chrome root program has started doing some continuous compliance monitoring based on CT as well.

But there is certainly a lot of ad-hoc checking by community members and academics, which as Sleevi said is one of the great things that CT enables.


Thanks for highlighting that— and for the efforts to assemble this project. Honestly before this post about the CT logs i hadn’t been aware of systematic auditing being done.




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