On Oct 23, 2007, at 12:46 AM, Arcane Jill wrote:
Can anyone tell me... is there a Firefox plugin which allows one to
view the fingerprint of the SSL certificate of each page you visit
(e.g. in the status bar or address bar or something)?
Better still if it can learn which ones you trust, but just being
able to view them without having to jump through hoops would be a
good start.
Suppose you did have a convenient way to display the SSL certificate
for every site whenever you loaded a page from the site. You
probably wouldn't want to memorize all the certificates for the
secure sites that you care about, so you might instead write some
notes on a piece of paper next to your computer, for example writing
down an SSL certificate and then next to it writing "bank", and then
writing down another one and then next to it writing "mail", and so on.
Then, whenever you load a page, you would look at the SSL certificate
that is linked to that page and glance at your notepad to see which
description it maps to. If you are looking at a random web site that
you've never seen before, and the certificate doesn't appear on your
notes, then no big deal. If you are looking at a page that appears
to belong to your bank, and the certificate that came with that page
doesn't appear on your notes, then this is a big red flag! Likewise,
if you are looking at a page that appears to belong to your bank, and
the certificate appears on your notes, but the note next to it
doesn't say "bank", then this is a red flag, too! For example, it
might be the certificate of your mail service, which appears on your
paper along with the note "mail". Or it might just be a certificate
that appears on your paper along with the note "joke site from Harry".
Note that a system which classified certificates into "trusted" or
"untrusted" categories might give you the green flag even when a
certificate that you trust to serve up good jokes is serving up
something that appears to be your bank account.
So, the thing about writing down certificates and mapping them to
short hand-written notes is what the Pet Name Toolbar automates for you:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/957
Please let us know how it works for you.
Regards,
Zooko
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