DEF CON 19 - Moxie Marlinspike - SSL And The Future Of Authenticity
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as the classic overview of why TLS certificate trust is flawed, and it resurfaces whenever CA or HTTPS security comes up.
What it is
Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 19 talk on the weaknesses of SSL and the certificate authority system. He explains how CA trust became a problem and proposes an alternative that removes the CA oligopoly without reducing security.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2013 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec mashedvikings · 2018-04 · on “Mythology About Security”
"Often hear that the reason today’s Internet is not more secure is that the early designers failed to imagine that security could ever matter." Related to this, you should definitely watch Moxie Marlinspike's (lead dev of Signal) talk where he tells about his discussion with Kipp Hickman, a developer of SSL: [this video] (until 16:33)
Strong rec 8organicbits · 2023-02 · on “Weakening TLS protection, South Korean style”
I've found Moxie Marlinspike's talk [1] to be a great overview of these sorts of issues. IIRC, he built an alternate system discussed in the talk. But I believe that's defunct. (Tangent, anyone know the postmortem on that?) [this video]
Recommends maqp · 2019-11 · on “Encrypted web traffic now exceeds 90%”
Moxie has good points about the problems TLS has. And they are not about breaking TLS via cryptanalysis: [this video]
Recommends mbakke · 2020-12 · on “Security expert warned SolarWinds in 2019 that anyone could access server”
Whenever I hear statements like "incredibly complex and sophisticated attack" I'm reminded of the 2011 Comodo (now Sectigo) hack where the company said it had "clinical accuracy" and "likely to be a [Iranian] state-driven attack". Days later, the perpetrator released a "manifesto" (and several other documents) all but confirming that it was the work of a lucky amateur. Moxie (of Signal fame) has a hilarious account of the story in his 2011 Blackhat talk "SSL and the future of authenticity" (starts at around 5:00): [this video]
Cites arantius · 2013-11 · on “Moving forward on improving HTTP's security”
Recently learned of [LINK] (talk: [this video] ) which sounds quite promising. It's not perfect (private, non routable sites?) but removes the certificate authority oligopoly from the picture without reducing security (AFAICT).
Cites cyphar · 2025-10 · on “Let's Not Encrypt (2019)”
> the CA would be immediately distrusted by browsers, not as punishment but to deter state actors This is not practically possible for browsers to do, as it would also cause all of the legitimate certificates signed by that CA to become distrusted and break large swathes of the internet. This was one of the main complaints Moxie Marlinspike had in his 2011 talk on TLS (the contents of which are sadly just as true today as they were then)[1]. In fact, there is fairly credible evidence that the NSA did actually do this already back in 2011 with the DigiNotar hack to steal the contents of Iranian emails[2]. This case was so egregious that DigiNotar did get distrusted by browsers, but other hack
Cites cyphar · 2026-05 · on “Parallel Reconstruction of Lawful TLS Wiretapping”
> One of Web PKI's security holes is the fact that any CA can issue valid certs for any domain. The only official "mitigation" for that is voluntary and can be defeated. In case you were not aware, Moxie Marlinspike spoke about this at length back in the early 2010s[1]. His view was that the problem is that certificate authority trust is controlled by the wrong people (web hosts, not users -- or browsers, as a proxy for user wishes) and is not possible to revoke because once a web host uses a particular CA you are stuck trusting them forever otherwise the internet will break. > The solution to that is to rearchitect the Web PKI ecosystem to use domain registrars as the sole source of truth f