Certificate authority Comodo, which has come in for a bit of a battering as a result of hacked certificates, has called for a great push forward. At the 80th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Prague, vice president Philip Hallam-Baker presented a mechanism for limiting the mis-issue of certificates. "The risk of mis-issue is very, very large," explained Hallam-Baker, to laughter from the assembled experts. Multiple Comodo SSL registration authorities were the targets of hacks of the company's systems. In at least one case, certificates were issued without the knowledge of the relevant domain operator, forcing all browser vendors to issue updates.
