Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast
by Tim Callan and Jason Soroko
Latest episode
Root Causes 688: eMudhra Exits the WebPKI After Key Compromise
Root Causes 688: eMudhra Exits the WebPKI After Key Compromise
About this podcast
Digital certificate industry veterans Tim Callan and Jason Soroko explore the issues surrounding digital identity, PKI, and cryptographic connections in today's dynamic and evolving computing world. Best practices in digital certificates are continually under pressure from technology trends, new laws and regulations, cryptographic advances, and the evolution of our computing architectures to be more virtual, agile, ubiquitous, and cloud-based. Jason and Tim (and the occasional guest subject matter expert) will help you stay current on developments in this essential technology platform and to understand the whys and wherefores of popular Public Key Infrastructures.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 688 episodes
- Root Causes 688: eMudhra Exits the WebPKI After Key Compromise · 14 min · Episode 688In this episode about the key compromise at the public certificate authority eMudhra and its exit from the WebPKI, Jason and Tim discuss how a researcher found intermediate CA…
- Root Causes 687: Tim Joins Microsoft · 10 min · Episode 687In this episode about Tim's move from Sectigo to Microsoft, Jason and Tim discuss why Microsoft runs a public certificate authority strictly for its own use, and what Tim's new…
- Root Causes 686: Why Merkle Trees Need Mirrors · 9 min · Episode 686In this episode about Merkle trees and cryptographic mirrors, Jason and Tim discuss Jason's hands-on experiment building an RFC-compliant Merkle tree to log autonomous AI actions…
- Root Causes 685: A Phone Number Is Not an Identity · 13 min · Episode 685In this episode about the security risks of treating a phone number as an identity, Jason and Tim discuss why a telephone number is merely a routing label for potential…
- Root Causes 684: What Is Certificate Agility? · 17 min · Episode 684In this episode about certificate agility, Jason and Tim discuss what it takes to replace any or all digital certificates across an organization rapidly and reliably. They…
- Root Causes 683: What Is a Turducken Certificate · 31 min · Episode 683In this episode about "Turducken" (post-quantum opt-out) certificates and WebPKI downgrade attacks, Jason and Tim discuss why trusting even a single classical Certificate…
- Root Causes 682: ccTLD DNS Hijack Exposed by CT Logs · 9 min · Episode 682In this episode, Jason and Tim discuss the recent compromise of DNS for several country-code top-level domains, including .gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone) and .as (American…
- Root Causes 681: The Basis for Cryptographic Agility · 25 min · Episode 681In this episode, Jason and Tim start from the P versus NP question and use a Sudoku puzzle to show the difference between problems that are easy to check and hard to solve. We…
- Root Causes 680: Bugzilla Bloodbath Redux · 12 min · Episode 680In this episode, Tim and Jason revisit the "Bugzilla bloodbath," the surge of public CA compliance incidents on Mozilla's Bugzilla, which has become the official WebPKI incident…
- Root Causes 679: Chrome Plans to Remove All Non-MTC CAs · 16 min · Episode 679As the WebPKI drives toward a Merkle Tree architecture for post quantum cryptography, we have seen a significant development. Google Chrome has announced its preliminary…
- Root Causes 678: The Harmonic Observatory - Simulating Quantum Fourier Transform, Part 2 · 11 min · Episode 678Jason uses a quantum simulator to show us how a cryptographically relevant quantum comptuer (CRQC) would employ Shor's algorithm to attack RSA. Part two of two, with guest Bruno…
- Root Causes 677: The Harmonic Observatory - Simulating Quantum Fourier Transform, Part 1 · 14 min · Episode 677Jason uses a quantum simulator to show us how a cryptographically relevant quantum comptuer (CRQC) would employ Shor's algorithm to attack RSA. Part one of two, with guest Bruno…
- Root Causes 676: The Quantum Choir - Simulating Grover's Algorithm, Part 2 · 9 min · Episode 676In this second of two episodes, Jason walks guest Bruno Coulliard and me through his real-world experience building quantum simulators, including some of the lessons he learned.
- Root Causes 675: The Quantum Choir - Simulating Grover's Algorithm, Part 1 · 20 min · Episode 675In this first of two episodes, Jason walks guest Bruno Coulliard and me through his real-world experience building quantum simulators, including some of the lessons he learned.
- Root Causes 674: Cryptographic Agility on Both Axes · 19 min · Episode 674Repeat guest Bruno Coulliard of Crypto4A joins us to discuss the accelerating pace of change in digital technology, which is going at a rate unprecedented in human history. How…
- Root Causes 673: Harvest Now, Decrypt 83 Years Later · 16 min · Episode 673Researchers have used AI to decode two German Enigma messages that have remained unbroken since the second world war. We describe how this was accomplished.
- Root Causes 672: New AI-driven Attack on RSA 1024 Revealed · 16 min · Episode 672This year we have seen a series of AI-enabled cryptographic attacks. In this episode we discuss a new exploit to abuse signing mechanisms in HSMs.
- Root Causes 671: IETF Releases MTC Draft 6 · 18 min · Episode 671The PLANTS working group in IETF recently released its draft 6 of the Merkle Tree Certificates standard. We go over what is new in this draft.
- Root Causes 670: Apple Announces Its MTC Root Program · 22 min · Episode 670Apple has announced it will support Merkle Tree Certificates for PQC and has released a draft root store policy. We share some of the surprising requirements in this draft.
- Root Causes 669: The clientAuth EKU Deprecation Is Coming · 10 min · Episode 669Publicly trusted client authentication certificates have a hard deadline to be deprecated in Q1 2027. Not everyone is ready for that. We discuss some of the reasons why and what…
