ianG wrote:
On 8/01/13 15:16 PM, Adam Back wrote:
[...] a story about how their bank is just totally
hopeless.
[...]
So. Totally hopeless. A recipe for disaster.
Obviously we cannot fix this. But what we can do is decide who is
responsible, and decide how to make them carry that responsibility.
Hence the question. Who is responsible for phishing?
Vendor? CA? User? Bank? SSL techies?
If it's about liability allocation, I'll leave others to comment.
If it's about what might be envisioned by each actor group, I have an
observation about SSL techies. I guess I qualify as among the group, but
my difficulty is to train other techies about the consequences of crypto
scientific/academic results.
Two cases where SSL techies seem hopeless (to me) in applying academic
results:
The MD5 brokenness got serious attention from the PKI community only
when an actual collision was shown on a real certificate, no sooner
(this particular work has little value as a scientific contribution
besides its industrial impact). Even worse, the random certificate
serial number short term patch has become "best practice" and PKI
techies now come up with fantasies about its rationales (see discussion
starting at
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/pkix/current/msg32098.html ).
Dan Bernstein made (with help of colleagues) a demonstration that DNSSEC
NSEC3 mechanism comes with an off-line dictionary attack vulnerability
as a "DNS zone walking" countermeasure. DNSSEC techies just flamed the
messenger (on other grounds), ignored the warning, and quietly left the
vulnerability in oblivion. Professor Bernstein moved to other issues.
For the record, DNS zone walking is a DNS privacy threat introduced by
plain DNSSEC (e.g. the attacker quickly discovers
s12e920be.atm-network.example.com because atm-nework.example.com is
DNSSEC-signed without NSEC3). The NSEC3 patch development delayed DNSSEC
protocol completion by a few years. The prof Bernstein presentation came
after the DNSSEC RFC's were done.
So, when trying to promote an IT security innovation (e.g. if phishing
could be reduced by some scheme that would protect the banks against
their own incompetence), the typical expert in the audience is subject
to this kind of short sightedness about established practice.
So, I would envision any strategy to make academic results and IT
security innovation more palatable to IT experts. This is how I feel
responsible for the hopeless phishing minefield!
Regards,
--
- Thierry Moreau
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