One of the things I recently discovered (to my surprise) is that client certs used in browsers are out of scope for browser policy purposes. This is because *the server* is the relying party, and there is no decision of reliance to make in the browser. So the vendor doesn’t care.
And, as we know, for the most part servers require a fair bit of config to get up and going … so even a decision to distro the root of one player or another isn’t so important.
The playing field is more or less level. What’s perhaps more controversial is this claim: client certs deliver more bang-for-buck in real security benefits than any other use of certs.
Which means that our idea of using client certs every where (CATS.cacert.org originally, but now webmail, archives, and this very blog!) is also a good strategic direction. We can deliver!
Therefore, Apache tutorials like this one by Dan are much more important. Download it today! Put it into practice on your website! Not to mention, that client certs delivers lots of administration benefits in easing our management of sites, as I muse on over at my blog. Have you noticed how there are no complaints about lost passwords over at CATS.cacert.org? No more comment spam on this blog [1]?
What I would like to see is a list of systems where CAcert certs are now in definite use. Production. Benefits! This would include CATS in pole position, also the blog, the webmail, the mail archives. Also possibly that OpenID server (is that run by Assurers? I assume so… I’m not even sure where it is).
[1] OK, it seems that only a very few long suffering admins could even see it. So you probably can’t see it, … and can’t imagine the joy of not having to deal with it ever again 🙂 I checked last night, there is a tiny bit of trackback spam, which I can’t quite see how to deal with, but nobody cares about trackback these days…
