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DEF CON 19 - Moxie Marlinspike - SSL And The Future Of Authenticity

DEFCONConference · 11.1K views · 2013-11-02 · 46:22

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2013–2026

Topics

CryptographySecurity & hacking
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ssltlscertificate authoritiessecuritymoxie marlinspikedef con

What people said

8organicbits · 2023-02 · Strong recommendation

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?) [VIDEO]

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mashedvikings · 2018-04 · Strong recommendation

"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: [VIDEO] (until 16:33)

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mbakke · 2020-12 · Recommendation

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): [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by DEFCONConference, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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