I'd like to announce two design documents.
The primary intention is to improve the functionality of SSL client
authentication in Mozilla software.
In short, we'd like to stop the current prompts and implement a better
user interface.
The basic idea is to show an indicator in chrome whenever a site asks
for client authentication, and give the user full control over using a
personal certificate for authentication (or not using one). The
interface should also support persistent configuration, per site. It
should be powerful enough to support complex sites and work with
appearing/disappearing certs which are stored on smartcards.
While brainstorming on above solution, I concluded that its core idea (a
chrome indicator for SSL authentication state) could be extended to
cover bad SSL server authentication status, e.g. server certs which can
not be chained to a trusted root cert.
Although we have a good solution in the browser (show an error page,
allow override), the solution in non-browser applications (e.g.
Thunderbird) is inferior. In version 3.x Thunderbird kept using a
click-through approach.
When a non-browser application encounters a bad certificate, we should
no longer show a prompt that allows click-through. Instead, we should
use an error status indicator in the chrome (for one or multiple
failures), and have users access it to deliberately add an exception.
Any application could use this approach, whether or not it has a content
area associated to a particular SSL connection.
I've described both ideas in detail in two documents which I've uploaded
here:
http://kuix.de/mozilla/sslauth/
I'm aware that Aza Raskin published some related thoughts at
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/identity-in-the-browser-firefox/ in
November 2009. I apologize that I've not been able to publish my
documents earlier.
I'm looking forward to your feedback.
Thanks and Regards,
Kai
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