Your man in the middle argument is invalid, no matter how much you write.
It really isn’t and it’s a significant part of why PKI exists in the first place. I’ve been doing this stuff professionally for over a decade and am very familiar with ISO27001, SOC2, and CIS standards, as well as generally just finding that a healthy dose of paranoia in computing keeps things more secure. Understanding how and why PKI works and is architected as it is is something that I recommend that everyone involved in technology explore.
Just trust youur self signed certs and you users see no difference.
This is problematic if a service needs to be redeployed, the cert expires, or becomes compromised, leaking its keys. In the former two scenarios, the new cert needs to be added on all of your end users’ machines. If you have just a few users, sure, that’s easy enough but, tedious and unnecessary. If it is a case of the latter, you now need to revoke the cert on all systems that have trusted it and deploy a new one. Again, tedious and prone to human error. Plus, you have to hope that you detect this quickly, otherwise a malicious host can harvest a lot of potentially-sensitive information, a situation easily prevented with a trusted CA.
That’s even more secure than blindly trusting the idiots from verisign.
I’m not suggesting that a public CA is the best choice for everyone or every situation. For internal use, a well-managed private CA or LE is probably a better choice, purely from a cost perspective.
I’d also like to understand why you are so hostile towards Verisign and feel better qualified in cert management. Were you or someone close to you caught up in their 2010 breach?
Don’t act so smug.
Not sure where this hostility is coming from. I am primarily explaining how these statements are not in line with intended use of security technologies and best practices. If you don’t like currently accepted security best practices, that’s absolutely your prerogative.