Recent events (2011) have indicated a threat from unknown actors in nation states who have forged certificates. This was done in order to create a MITM attack against political activists in Syria accessing Facebook over the web. This would have normally triggered a browser warning, but would not if the MITM certificate was issued by a valid certificate authority already trusted by a browser or other software. Similar attacks were used by Stuxnet which allowed software to impersonate trusted code. The point of certificate transparency is to allow an end user to determine, using a simple procedure if a certificate is in fact valid. Checking against the default bundle of certificates may not be enough to do this, and therefore an additional check is desired. Other suggestions for certificate transparency have also been advanced.
Recent events (2011) have indicated a threat from unknown actors in nation states who have forged certificates. This was done in order to create a MITM attack against political activists in Syria accessing Facebook over the web. This would have normally triggered a browser warning, but would not if the MITM certificate was issued by a valid certificate authority already trusted by a browser or other software. Similar attacks were used by Stuxnet which allowed software to impersonate trusted code. The point of certificate transparency is to allow an end user to determine, using a simple procedure if a certificate is in fact valid. Checking against the default bundle of certificates may not be enough to do this, and therefore an additional check is desired. Other suggestions for certificate transparency have also been advanced.