> There needs to be an easy way for end users to personally drop trust of CAs they don't need and have that decision respected and remembered.

There is. On macOS go to Keychain Access > System Roots and disable the kind of trust you want to disable. There's probably a scriptable method for that.

On Windows, open the management console to "Certificates". Then go through the list and move/remove/distrust any certificates you dislike. There are also powershell tools you can use.

On Linux, the situation is a bit annoying. You can remove all CA certificates manually and make the directory read-only to break any attempt from your distro to interfere with the list. You need to check your distro documentation to see if they use /etc/ca-certificates or /etc/ssl or something like /etc/pki for reference. Some distros offer a partial GUI as well.

Programs that deem themselves smarter than the OS (true in the case of macOS and various Linux distros), like browsers, the JVM or NodeJS applications, can have their own cert stores.

You will need to acknowledge half a dozen certificate prompts for every website you visit after this, though. Make sure to compare the fingerprints of the CA root certificate with the real ones you might find elsewhere, because it's easy to generate your own CA and copy all certificate information signed by your self-generated key.

If you want access to the whole internet and not just part of it, it has to be "one size fits all users". (At least with how the internet works currently.)

Have you checked with the newsgroups and gopher web on why this became a thing?

There are three futures, each being dystopia than current:

- Only ISRG(Let's encrypt) being the sole CA and benevolent dictator of the internet. (then forced to be dissolved due to antitrust?)

- Each country controls their own CA and you need to purchase 200+ certs in order to make your website generally accessible. (then country XXX will charge you $200/year)

- Big techs owning OS/Browsers control their own CA and cross license each other (then Apple still being lazy handling incidents) (then they form a cartel and block others, like current Tier 1 ISP, email senders, credit card networks)

edit: put enter between numbered items.

Someone has to decide on a set of default CAs to trust... It's natural that it's your OS vendor, since the trust store is an OS thing.

Because nobody is going to be arsed to figure this shit out, even the PGP fanatics don't bother.

So someone has to do it, and a pop-up on first boot asking you which "certificate providers" you want to trust would be as pointless as the "which browser do you want to use" ones were.

Honestly that last paragraph I totally agree. I did edit to “never trust” these clowns’ root CAs in Keychain Access on my Mac, and this is the first I’m hearing that there was any possibility of that being flipped back. Will have to look into that.

If I can speculate though on why these bundles come from the browser or OS and aren’t fully in the user’s responsibility. You’d have to start from scratch for it to not have a bunch of stuff the user had ‘no need for’ to be present, and the user would need to see a cert window semi-frequently that gives the possibility to start trusting a CA, and the bottom 99.99% of users in sophistication has no idea whether they should say yes or no. I mean, without being signed by a root CA you already trust, even the name on the new CA could be completely made up. “Do you want to trust the ‘Apple Root Certificate Authority’?”

Yet they ask you what keyboard type to use, what Wifi network and password to use. Is it too much to ask, do you want to trust "key authorities" from outside your country? Users used to see computers as inherently technical devices and expect to get asked technical questions.

But even if not, you get asked whether to turn on Siri, whether to send telemetry, whether to sign away your rights, etc., all of which are consequential but prompts are massaged in a way where it's nice and easy for the user to answer a certain way without having a clue. Makes me think user comprehension isn't even a problem.

Where I suspect the problem lies is that it will not fly to make it seem like US-based CA's are more trustworthy just because the majority of sites roll up to them. Then you'll need to do some non-country-specific human tiering, and who's the judge of that?

>do you want to trust "key authorities" from outside your country?

So what happens to americans visiting french sites?

"It seems like you're visiting a site registered in XYZ country. Do you want to start trusting XYZ country key authorities?

[Do Not Trust], [Trust Once], [Trust Forever]"

Then users just proceeds to hit trust for everything, just like people blindly accept ssh keys.

The country comparison doesn't do much either, because there isn't a good guarantee that they'll correspond. Some guy posted a repo to distrust every CA except the top 30, and that has a bunch of weird examples, like a bunch of russian sites being signed by a Greek CA. Not to mention some of the biggest sites use CAs that don't correspond with their country of origin. GlobalSign is Belgian for instance. Guess how many of their customers aren't Belgian?

Isn't the whole point of this to decide what "shady" CA's to trust? If a Russian site bothered to get signed in Greece, some people will trust the site, and some people will distrust the Greek CA's. That's how trust works.

You can add other options too, "Trust for 30 days" or something. I wish SSH known hosts has an auto-expunge.