Tag Archives: Roots

PKIjs and trust lists

As you probably know Yury and I think Same Origin Certificates (or Browser Bound Certificates) are the way PKI enabled applications will be built in the future. This is why we have been working on PKIjs for so long.

One of the issues you have when building applications that use this concept is deciding what Certificate Authorities you should trust. The answer to that question is pretty nuanced but the short version is only as many as you absolutely need to.

There are four trust stores that I personally think are interesting when thinking about digital signatures these include Mozilla’s, Microsoft’s, Adobe’s and the EUTL.

If you want to work with these lists you need to be able to parse them and get the CA certificates that are meaningful to you.

This is why we have created tl-create, it can (at the time of this post) parse the Mozilla list and the EUTL list.*

* At this time the EUTL trust list does no signature verification and should only be used for experimentation.

The output of which is either a PEM bag of certificates or Javascript array that you can import into your PKIjs based applications as trust anchors.

Hopefully you will find this interesting and useful, pull requests are welcomed.