Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

By Tim Callan and Jason SorokoBusiness Science Technology

Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast episodes

September 04 Root Causes 661: What Will Happen with eIDAS and MTC?
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.
11 min
September 02 Root Causes 660: What Are Delegated Credentials?
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.
4 min
August 31 Root Causes 659: Should We Lengthen Certificate Lifespans?
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.
13 min
August 26 Root Causes 658: The Trouble with X9 Certificates
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.
13 min
August 24 Root Causes 657: What Is Chaos Engineering?
"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.
2 min
August 21 Root Causes 656: The Trouble with Recursive AI Training
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.
7 min
August 19 Root Causes 655: Why Not to Create Your Own Private CA
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.
6 min
August 17 Root Causes 654: What's the Difference Between ML-DSA and ML-KEM?
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.
8 min
August 14 Root Causes 653: Post Quantum Civilization
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.
8 min
August 12 Root Causes 652: Choosing WebPKI Deprecation Dates
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.
11 min

About Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

From the publisher's feed

Digital certificate industry veterans Tim Callan and Jason Soroko explore the issues surrounding digital identity, PKI, and cryptographic connections in today's dynamic and evolving computing world.…