Julien Pierre wrote:

> So SSL security
plays a much more important role than you think. I know this from experience.


You have experience of someone stealing your
credit card over a connection?  That's something
I'd like to hear about.  It would be very useful
to apply some statistics to the situation.


I'm hoping that Mozilla can realise this.  There
is an opportunity here to restart the security
process that has lain dormant for a decade.  And
a crying need - the threats today are from spoofs/
phishing, viruses, insider robbery, database hacks,
and so forth - all of which need to be addressed by
a wholistic approach to security, not by worrying
about this cert or that CA covering a threat that
doesn't exist except in the minds of cryptography
academics.


Certainly other attacks exist, but attacks on certificates are one type of attacks that is possible. I agree that indeed Mozilla should be reviewed for all types of attacks, not just crypto/certificates attacks, but not that we should ignore crypto/certificates attacks.


How much time is spent arguing about crypto/cert
attacks?  How much time is spent coding for phishing
attacks?  How many of each attack occur, and how
much are people losing on each attack?

In the sector I've spent most of my time monitoring,
DGCs (digital gold currencies) I've seen maybe 50
phishing attacks.  One used SSL.  None were protected
by the CAs.  Zero, zip, nada.

In fact, one DGC, a quite successful one, didn't
even bother to use a CA cert.  The site purchased
a multi-year one about 2 years back and took over
a year to install it;  meantime customers had to
"suffer" doing $1000 transactions over "unprotected"
self-signed cert-protected SSL connections.

Everybody knew this, and nothing happened. Why?

No crook in his right mind or even his wrong mind
would do an MITM.  It just isn't a practical attack.
That applies as much to open, cleartext connections
as to SSL connections.  So, what's the threat here?

It's possible to scale Everest, and has been done
many times by the daft and the frigid.  That doesn't
mean that Nepal has to worry about a flood of refugees
from that direction....

iang
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