On Jun 15, 2016, at 10:40 AM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote: > > Thanks, that means no need to install CA. There is always someone (Thanks, > Warren!) who looked deeper into things, and can explain them. I claimed that the topic fills books. That wasn’t an exaggeration. Back in 1997, I read the first edition of this thick tome: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000455.do The second edition is about 50% bigger, and it’s about 15 years old now, so it could probably be 1,000 pages and still not cover everything about the modern Internet PKI. I’m not sure I could recommend a book that old in a field that still changes as much as web security does. Perhaps someone else could recommend something more current. > I need to look deeper myself how the identity of the server > is ensured in this case As I said in a prior email, there are different grades of certificate. I mentioned EV and DV. There’s also OV: https://www.globalsign.com/en/ssl-information-center/types-of-ssl-certificate/ > (i.e. whether tier 2, tier 3, … The tier doesn’t affect how the CA does validation. You could have a very meticulous tier 3 EV provider and a sloppy tier 1 provider that only does DV. > can > I still trust that the physical entity owning server cert is indeed who it > claims to be). It’s a chain of trust: the browser vendor trusts these 1,100 CAs, and you trust the browser vendor, so you implicitly trust all of the certs signed, directly or indirectly by those CAs. If you want to take an active role in this, you need to go into the trust store for the browser(s) you use and remove CAs you do not trust.