Can somebody ELI5?
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Google trough the Chrome Project are pushing certificate authorities to offer automated certificates services to customers to make their use more prolific. Certificate authorities only have value if they are included in the certificate store, so they will do whatever it takes to be in there. Certificate authorities are the organizations we trust to say if a website is secure enough to display the lock in the browser instead of an error.
Hi I’m 5 years old and I have no clue what you just said.
In order to know that you are talking to the right website on the web, you need someone else that you trust to say they are who they say they are. That is a Certificate Authority. They verify that the example.com you are talking to is the actual example.com through math that's hard to fake. Currently, the process of performing this verification can be either done manually by a person or automatically through software depending on what the Certificate Authority supports. Chrome is planning on changing their policy to require that an automatic option be available for all Certificate Authorities, without necessarily taking away the manual option from those who still want to use it.
That was absolutely digestible by a 5 year old like me. Many thanks!