[cabfpub] Upcoming changes to Google Chrome's certificatehandling

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

The reason I object to the term 'fork' is that in the open source community forking a distribution is completely legitimate. In fact 
the ability to fork is one of the definitions of being open. I gave up on Java after Sun sued Microsoft for attempting to fork. 
Whatever the rights and wrongs of that case were, I was not going to invest in any system without the option to fork if I don't like 
the future direction.

I think there are two attacks that you are covering with 'fork'

Misrepresentation: The log maintainer asserts that two incompatible values are the current state of the log.

Impersonation: An unrelated party purports that an incompatible value is the current state of the log.


Impersonation is easy to defeat, the maintainer just signs the current state of the log.

To prevent misrepresentation the maintainer has to be on record attesting to the current state of the log and that has to be done in 
such a way that the perfidy is transparent. The obvious way to do that in a single stream log is to require the maintainer to 
checkpoint their log signatures from time to time.


I can't keep bit level context on CT right now. There is too much else on my stack. I will however be going into it in bit level 
detail in the near future when I look to see if I can reuse any of the data formats and/or structures.