"Steven M. Bellovin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >There's another issue: initial account setup. People will still need to rely >on certificate-checking for that. It's a real problem at some hotspots, >where Evil Twin attacks are easy and lots of casual users are signing up for >the first time.
It really depends on the value of the account, for high-value ones I would hope it's done out-of-band (so you can't just sign up for online banking by going to a bank's purported web page and saying "Hi, I'm Bob, give me access to my account"), and for low-value stuff like Facebook I'm not sure how much effort your password is worth to an attacker when they can get a million others from the same site. I agree that it's still a problem, but switching to failsafe auth is a major attack surface reduction since now an attacker has to be there at the initial signup rather than at any arbitrary time of their choosing. It's turning an open channel into a time- and location-limited channel. Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
