On Tuesday, 21 April 2015 07:43:34 UTC+1, Marko V wrote:
>
> As Zack says, you're not trusting the certificate, you're wanting Google 
> to.
>

No. No, I'm not. I'm wanting Google to attempt to log in to another server 
on my behalf, using my password, on the condition that the server it's 
logging into can demonstrate it holds the private key corresponding to a 
particular public key. That doesn't put Google in the position of having to 
trust anybody at all; the risk is that my password will be divulged to a 
third party, which won't happen unless somebody gets the private key, but 
Google doesn't stand to lose in any circumstance.

 

> As he also rightly mentions, it is about the third party verification. 
> There is no valid reason to trust any self-signed certificate.
>

No. If you know that it was generated by the person who is trying to 
authenticate themselves (or their server) to you, then you can trust

 

> Somebody performing a man-in-the-middle attack can just as easily generate 
> one and Google's system would be none the wiser.
>

No. No, no. Go back to my post, because you either didn't understand it or 
just plain didn't read it. I did not ask for a "blindly accept all 
self-signed certificates" button. I asked for the ability to approve a 
*particular* certificate. That is how almost all other email clients (and 
browsers) handle self-signed certificates; they let you see the certificate 
(or its fingerprint) and decide whether to add it to a list of certificates 
to be accepted. Generate as many of your own certificates as you want, but 
good luck generating one with the same SHA-2 as mine...


Can we now talk about solutions that will let me read my email, rather than 
me having to explain basic security theory to people who assume I'm an 
idiot?

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