Re: About SSL "Trick or Treat" Dialogs

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 19:51 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 00:34 +0000, Stef Walter wrote:

> > A TCP connection is basically untrusted. And an SSL connection to
> > someone we can't verify is the same from a trust perspective.
> > 
> > Of course, if someone (like Pat with his mail server) has noted a
> > specific certificate to be trust worthy, then it will be treated as
> > trusted whether or not we have a root CA for it.
> > 
> > But presenting the user with the choice every time is wrong in my opinion.
> 
> Yes, asking the user is wrong... TLS was designed to have central
> signing authorities. To make it work as designed, you have to *DENY* the
> self-signed case and force server admins to do one of:
> 
>  A) Buy a cert from an existing CA
>  B) Work with others to create an alternate CA system 
>  C) Tell their users how to install a certificate

Not even that is really secure. All it means is that someone paid a CA
money for a cert. If someone buys a cert from verisign and then sets up
a bank site using a domain name that is a misspelled version of some
known bank your browser would still say this was a secure site.