> What you ultimately want is to make sure you're communicating with the correct other party. And the way to achieve this is TLS with certificates, validated via the WebPKI.
The thing is TLS with certificates doesn't always achieve this and we know this because there have been real world successful attacks. E.g. intermediate CA certs being issued to bad actors, certificates for major domains being issued to people who don't control them, etc. The issue with the CA ecosystem is not that they're evil, it's just that they don't validate what regular users expect them to validate and that they are also subject to human error, governmental and commercial pressure.
The more common issue with the validation CA's can perform for DV certs is that it just tells me that you controlled a domain for a given moment in time at some point in the past (pretty much up to a year ago). To fix this we introduced ways to mitigate the vulnerabilities of TLS, watching CT logs for your domains, HSTS, CAA record restrictions. Unfortunately if you do secure your infrastructure in this ways you have added complexity and will likely discover how your infrastructure can break in new and interesting ways too.
The thing is TLS with certificates doesn't always achieve this and we know this because there have been real world successful attacks. E.g. intermediate CA certs being issued to bad actors, certificates for major domains being issued to people who don't control them, etc. The issue with the CA ecosystem is not that they're evil, it's just that they don't validate what regular users expect them to validate and that they are also subject to human error, governmental and commercial pressure.
The more common issue with the validation CA's can perform for DV certs is that it just tells me that you controlled a domain for a given moment in time at some point in the past (pretty much up to a year ago). To fix this we introduced ways to mitigate the vulnerabilities of TLS, watching CT logs for your domains, HSTS, CAA record restrictions. Unfortunately if you do secure your infrastructure in this ways you have added complexity and will likely discover how your infrastructure can break in new and interesting ways too.