Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Root Causes 237: Why Mozilla Is So Important to CAs Aug 10, 2022

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Mozilla is a highly important to the world of public certificates, with influence beyond what the Firefox browser market share would suggest. In this episode we examine the historical reasons for this influence and the mechanisms that maintain that influence today.

Root Causes 236: Active Directory Patch Knocks Out Non-MS Identity Consumers Aug 04, 2022

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A recently revealed vulnerability in Active Directory made it possible for an attacker to escalate privileges inappropriately. Microsoft's responded with a patch in May 2022, which unfortunately has forced a difficult workaround for many common software components beyond Active Directory that will otherwise be incapable of working with AD identities. In this episode we explain what his happening, how it came about, and the broader lessons for PKI owners.

Root Causes 235: What Is Lattice-based Cryptography? Jul 26, 2022

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The recent winners of the NIST post-quantum cryptography contest are strongly focused on lattice-based encryption. In this episode we explain at a high level what this cryptographic approach entails and why lattice-based algorithms fared so well in the NIST search.

Root Causes 234: Report from the 2022 RSA Conference Jul 22, 2022

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The RSA Security Conference is back. In this episode we talk about what happened in 2020 and how the first post-COVID RSAC compared to earlier years, along with some of the major themes this year.

Root Causes 233: CISA Recommendations for Post-Quantum Crypto Jul 12, 2022

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In coordination with NIST's announcement of its new post-quantum cryptographic algorithm contest winners, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a bulletin listing six key actions for IT to commence now. We read out these six actions and put them in context.

Root Causes 232: NIST Announces Post Quantum Crypto Selections Jul 08, 2022

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NIST has announced its winning algorithms for round 3 of its post-quantum cryptography "contest." Join us as we name the winning algorithms and why they were chosen. We discuss the continuing effort to arrive at additional algorithms, and we talk about the next steps coming out of this announcement.

Root Causes 231: What Is FIDO? Jul 06, 2022

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Recent announcements about consumer passwordless authentication build on standards like FIDO and WebAuthn. In this episode we explain device-centric authentication, the FIDO Alliance, and how it all works.

Root Causes 230: What Is Apple Passkey? Jun 30, 2022

Show notes

Apple recently announced its Passkey functionality, which will allow passwordless authentication between Apple devices and supporting web services through key exchange. In this episode we discuss how this works, the user experience, the significance of FIDO and WebAuthn, and implications for consumer-facing sites.

Root Causes 229: Browsing Collectives and the 80/20 Rule of Browser Privacy Jun 08, 2022

Show notes

In this follow-on to our two previous podcasts, we elucidate additional potential schemes for preserving consumer privacy. We discuss data aggregation, the power of the default, decentralized blockchain identities, the death of cookies, browsing collectives, privacy browsers, and the 80/20 rule of browser entropy.

Root Causes 228: Getting the FLoC out of Here May 31, 2022

Show notes

In a follow-up to our recent episode on cookies and browser tracking, we discuss Google's Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) initiative, why it failed as a response, and other directions the industry is looking in.

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