Extended Validation certificates and cross-site scripting
Extended Validation certificates and cross-site scripting
Posted Mar 15, 2008 0:35 UTC (Sat) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)In reply to: Extended Validation certificates and cross-site scripting by gerv
Parent article: Extended Validation certificates and cross-site scripting
The assurances that they claim, even assuming that they are met, aren't meaningful. The only meaningful question is whether the site really is the site the user thinks it is, and that's something that a CA can't determine, because the CA doesn't know what site the user thinks something is. For example, there have been multiple organizations called, informally, "Chart Bank" doing business in Massachusetts in the last five years, entirely legally. If I'm a customer of one of them, and end up at the web site for a different one of them, I'm likely to reveal personal information and passwords to a third party with whom I have no business relationship and whose policies on data collected from failed login attempts I don't know. The only way to get a meaningful increase in security over regular SSL certificates is to ignore the CA entirely, and reserve the green location bar plus a user-selected description for certificates that the user has independently verified with the organization (for example, by comparing the certificate fingerprint with a fingerprint printed on their bank statements). Then, if the user goes to any site that doesn't have that certificate (or, more reasonably, doesn't have a certificate signed by the bank's signing certificate), it might get the lock and a yellow bar, but it won't get "My Bank" and a green bar, even if it's some legitimate site that could be the user's bank but happens not to be.