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Add "Using EV certificate information" to considered alternatives
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Fixes WICG#12
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johannhof committed Feb 10, 2022
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Expand Up @@ -295,6 +295,28 @@ h. & i. Given the FPS with owner Site A and member Site B and Site C, if Site D

# Alternative designs

## Using EV Certificate information

[Extended Validation (EV)
Certificates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Validation_Certificate), in
addition to backing encrypted exchange of information on the web, require
verification of the legal entity associated with the website a certificate is
issued for and encode information about this legal entity in the certificate
itself. It might be possible to match this information for sites presenting EV
certificates (or use the subjectAltName on a single EV certificate) to build
First-Party Sets.

Overall, we do not consider it desirable to couple identity or feature
exposure through First-Party Sets to the existing certificate infrastructure.
It's likely that this would negatively impact the deployment and use of
encryption on the web, for example by forcing sites to obtain EV certificates
to ensure continued functionality. A revocation of a certificate that is used
for FPS would have grave implications (such as deletion of all local data through
the Clear Site Data mechanism) and thus complicate the revocation process.

See [Issue 12](https://github.com/privacycg/first-party-sets/issues/12) for an extended
discussion.

## Signed Assertions and set discovery instead of static lists

Static lists are easy to reason about and easy for others to inspect. At the same time, they can develop deployment and scalability issues. Changes to the list must be pushed to each user's browser via some update mechanism. This complicates sites' ability to deploy new related domains, particularly in markets where network connectivity limits update frequency. They also scale poorly if the list gets too large.
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