The Lavabit Problem: the Universal TLS Key

Lavabit refused to hand over the key to the whole kingdom for the U.S. Government to ostensibly capture the traffic of one user.  The judge ruled in the prosecution's favor in the resulting court case:

Judge Claude Hilton said that it was effectively Levison's fault that sites have only a single private SSL key.

Ars doesn't evaluate the truth of that, but technically, it could be accurate.  The Perfect Forward Secrecy modes of TLS—DHE and ECDHE—effectively generate a key per connection, authenticating the parameters used to create it with the server's certificate (which is in turn authenticated by the CA system.)  However, if Lavabit's servers were set up to allow RSA-only modes, then that configuration introduces the weakness.  Under RSA, the server's private key becomes the master private key, capable of decrypting any connection traffic in those modes, because that private key is used to encrypt all the traffic.