this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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Centralized CAs were and are a mistake. HTTPs should work more like ssh-keys where the first time you connect to a website it's untrusted, but once you have validated it the website you want, it never bothers you again unless the private key changes. Private key rotations can be posted on public forums, or emailed, or any number of other ways and users that don't care can ignore the warnings like they do anyway, while users who DO care, can perform their own validation through other channels.
The most important aspect is that there is no "authority" that can be corrupted, except for the service you are connecting to.
There is no way a user can know the website is real the first time it's visited, without it presenting a verifiable certificate. It would be disastrous to trust the site after the first time you connected. Users shouldn't need to care about security to get the benefits of it. It should just be seamless.
There are proposals out there to do away with the CAs (Decentralized PKI), but they require adoption by Web clients. Meanwhile, the Web clients (chrome) are often owned by the same companies that own the Certificate Authorities, so there's no real incentive for them to build and adopt technology that would kill their $100+ million CA industry.
There is no way a user can know that their traffic hasn't been man-in-the-middled by a compromised CA either. And why is it "disastrous" to trust a website after you have cryptographically verified its the same website you visited before? It would present the same public/private key pair that you already trust.
making sure a small part is very secure vs having to verify every domain I visit? yeah, let me keep using the current system.... are you aware of the amount of domains you connect to every day?
Also, I might be wrong, but if I remember correctly browsers/OS-es tend to come with a list of trusted certificate keys already, which makes adding compromised keys to that list not as easy as you suggest. (I don't even know if that happens or if they just update as part of security updates of OS/browsers)