On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Ted Lemon <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sep 10, 2013, at 12:32 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > The CA NEVER ever gives the user the key in any of the systems I have
> worked on.
>
> This appears to be untrue.






> > Comodo offers that exact service today.
> >
> > https://secure.comodo.com/products/!SecureEmailCertificate_Signup
>
> The Comodo service generates the key pair for you.   This means that they
> have your private key.   We would hope that they would behave responsibly,
> but we don't have the assurance we would have if we generated the key pair
> and sent them only the public half.


You go to a Web page that has the HTML or Javascript control for generating
a keypair. But the keypair is generated on the end user's computer.

The service could send you an ActiveX keygen control with a backdoor but I
am not on Windows right now. I generated the keypair on Chrome and I have
all runtime objects turned off.

The CA returns the signed certificate to you, but that is the public key
part.



-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/

Reply via email to