Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

By Tim Callan and Jason SorokoBusiness Science Technology

Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast episodes

August 10 Root Causes 651: Look at a Calendar
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."
6 min
August 07 Root Causes 650: Is It Time to Stop Saying SSL?
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.
8 min
August 05 Root Causes 649: Client Authentication Certificate Use Cases
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.
12 min
August 03 Root Causes 648: Claude Mythos Discovers New HAWK and AES Attacks
Anthropic recently announced that Mythos has found mathematical weakness in the core algorithm for the third-round NIST PQC candidate HAWK, effectively halving its effective key strength. Mythos also developed a faster attack on a round-reduced version of AES-128. These are not implementation attacks but mathematical attacks on the core cryptography. We discuss the massive implications of these developments.
22 min
July 31 Root Causes 647: AD CS "Certighost" Flaw Highlights Agentic Identity Risks
A newly revealed flaw in Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) allows an attacker to improperly obtain cryptographic credentials for an agent. We discuss the implications that this flaw Certighost (pronounced sert-uh-GHOST) has for agentic AI at large.
20 min
July 29 Root Causes 646: Clarifying the Dates for clientAuth Deprecation
Because of a change in the drop-dead date, we have observed confusion in the timeline for deprecation of client authentication and mTLS for public TLS certificates. This is an inflexible deadline, and enterprises that are not ready risk outage. In this episode we spell out these dates very clearly.
6 min
July 27 Root Causes 645: FAPI 2.0 Principles
In our series on digital identity for AI agents, we discuss FAPI 2.0 as an option.
4 min
July 24 Root Causes 644: Cryptographically Bound Tokens
In our ongoing series on digital identity for agents, we have previous discussed use of certificates for authentication. In this episode we describe how cryptographic proof of possession can enable secure authentication using tokens.
6 min
July 22 Root Causes 643: Certificates for Stronger Agent Authentication
We survey different strategies for securely authenticating agentic AI, including certificates and SPIFFE. We discuss Zero Trust and the Principle of Least Privileges as applied to agents.
11 min
July 20 Root Causes 642: Anthropic to Support SPIFFE/SPIRE
Anthropic has announced its intentions to support SPIFFE/SPIRE with the SPIRE server rooted in an "upstream authority," which will require a root private CA rather than allowing self-attestation for agentic AI.
4 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.…