> Those who consider that Apple’s current online certificate checks are unnecessary, invasive or controlling should familiarise themselves with how they have come about, and their importance to macOS security. They should also explain how, having enjoyed their benefits for a couple of years, they’ve suddenly decided they were such a bad idea after all, and what should replace them.
I agree that anyone critiquing Apple's OCSP design should understand it, and the critique should be more nuanced than "just turn that feature off." Computers are now skeleton keys to our lives and we have to go forward rather than back in figuring out how to design them so they can safely do everything we need them to do.
But it's not hard to justify the sudden criticism here -- it happened after Apple's bad design of the OCSP feature broke local applications, drawing a lot more attention to how it worked. It's reasonable to then ask whether other parts of the design were also poor, as Apple itself obviously is from the changes it's already announced.
To take the author up on what should replace OCSP checks -- how about using something like bloom filters for offline checks, and something like haveibeenpwned's k-anonymity for online checks, to remove the possibility that either Apple or a third party could use OCSP for surveillance?
I agree that anyone critiquing Apple's OCSP design should understand it, and the critique should be more nuanced than "just turn that feature off." Computers are now skeleton keys to our lives and we have to go forward rather than back in figuring out how to design them so they can safely do everything we need them to do.
But it's not hard to justify the sudden criticism here -- it happened after Apple's bad design of the OCSP feature broke local applications, drawing a lot more attention to how it worked. It's reasonable to then ask whether other parts of the design were also poor, as Apple itself obviously is from the changes it's already announced.
To take the author up on what should replace OCSP checks -- how about using something like bloom filters for offline checks, and something like haveibeenpwned's k-anonymity for online checks, to remove the possibility that either Apple or a third party could use OCSP for surveillance?