On 11/09/2011, at 1:30, Douglas Huff <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sep 10, 2011, at 8:28 AM, Ian G wrote:
> 
>> Hi Adam,
>> 
>> On 10/09/2011, at 20:16, Adam Back <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> So I hear CA pinning mentioned a bit as a probable way forward, but I didnt
>>> see anyone define it on this list,
>> 
>> Adam described it in this list. The specific mechanism is less important 
>> than what it achieves: the browser knows that the website is constrained to 
>> use the certs of only one CA.
>> 
>> The rest is implementation detail.
> 
> It's not at all though!

:)

> Today CA compromise isn't even a, let alone the most, common way of 
> "exploiting" the blanket trust of all CAs involved in the PKI infrastructure.

Is the current attack an exploit? Or is it a direct attack on the 
infrastructure?

> The two most common methods are:
>  1) MITM where the attacker controls the victim's network connection to some 
> extent and redirects them to or proxies them through a different server.

Do you have any numbers on that? I thought this was relatively rare.

>  2) Phishing using a similar-looking domain name.

Yes. That's the big one in this space. Afaik.

> In case 1 any type of pinning that is not hardcoded in the software,

Sorry, please explain? Are you assuming that the user's machine / browser is 
compromised? If that is the case, isn't hard-coding just obfuscation?

Iang
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