At 11:09 PM -0400 3/25/08, Frank Hecker wrote: >As long as >domain names can be re-registered to different owners, there is always >this potential to some degree. It doesn't matter whether the cert >lifetime is 10 years, 1 year, or 1 week.
Exactly right. A CA re-affirms the binding between the public key and the identified party when it makes sense to. Some CAs think it makes sense every year; others every ten years. In the private PKI realm, there are CAs that re-affirm the binding daily. >If I purchase a domain name >today, it's possible that someone registered this domain a few days ago, >got a cert for it, returned the domain name for a refund, and is now >ready to attack. Thus if we take your statement literally then the >implication is that we should never use a DV cert with any domain >whatsoever, period, full stop. Right. > > It has nothing to do with economics, but a lot to do with the knowledge >> that when I visit a web site with Firefox which has a legitimate >> certificate, that the site I'm visiting belongs to the right guy. This >> is what DV certs are all about, this is what they guaranty and this is >> the lowest barrier and condition of the Mozilla CA policy. > >And I'm telling you that if we take your argument at face value then >there is no absolute guarantee, because this attack is theoretically >possible for any cert lifetime longer than a day or so. So we have to >fall back on judging relative risk, and that is what I've been trying to >do in my analysis. ...and if Mozilla wants to set a time period for CAs to re-affirm the binding, it should also look at relative risk as well. _______________________________________________ dev-tech-crypto mailing list dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
