It is surprising that we continue to see root expirations occur at the most inopportune times. Weekends, public holidays, even New Year's Eve. In this episode we have simple advice to anybody setting up a new root, which is "look at a calendar."
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Jason has 20 years of experience researching, innovating, educating markets, developing intellectual property, and contributing to national-level guidance and consortium standards. He works closely with enterprise companies daily to synthesize managed PKI security solutions that meet real-world operational needs.
Jason Soroko is a seasoned security technology innovator and Senior Fellow at Sectigo, where he leads customer-facing engagements, drives research, and spearheads strategic initiatives at both organizational and national levels. He also contributes to the development of intellectual property and consortium standards. As co-host of the award-winning “Root Causes” podcast, Jason educates professionals on the latest trends in PKI and cybersecurity twice a week. His core strength is bridging cutting-edge security methods with real-world operational needs, ensuring that businesses are equipped with practical, forward-thinking solutions.
Recent posts by Jason Soroko
SSL hasn't been a standard in use for nearly thirty years, but we still use the word. We discuss why that is, what else we might say, and the expected effect of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) on our technical vocabulary.
A newly revealed flaw in Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) allows an attacker to improperly obtain cryptographic credentials for an agent. We discuss the implications that this flaw Certighost (pronounced sert-uh-GHOST) has for agentic AI at large.
With the upcoming deprecation of client authentication using publicly trusted TLS certificates, we go over the common use cases for these certificates. We discuss the reasons public trust is often chosen and how to transition away from it.
Anthropic recently announced that Mythos has found mathematical weakness in the core algorithm for the third-round NIST PQC candidate HAWK, effectively halving its effective key strength. Mythos also developed a faster attack on a round-reduced version of AES-128. These are not implementation attacks but mathematical attacks on the core cryptography. We discuss the massive implications of these developments.
Because of a change in the drop-dead date, we have observed confusion about the timeline for deprecation of client authentication and mTLS for public TLS certificates. This is an inflexible deadline, and enterprises that are not ready risk outage. In this episode we spell out these dates very clearly.
In our series on digital identity for AI agents, we discuss FAPI 2.0 as an option.
In our ongoing series on digital identity for agents, we have previous discussed use of certificates for authentication. In this episode we describe how cryptographic proof of possession can enable secure authentication using tokens.
MTCs reduce PQC overhead using compact proofs, enabling fast, transparent, and scalable post-quantum certificate authentication.