Shane and I were having a quick chat about privacy and security UX and
we ended up chatting about an interesting concept to improve the user
experience when a 'bad' certificate is in use (expired, self-issued, etc)

Firefox already maintains a database of auto-complete fields, and over
time a user will have a set of data that could potentially be used to
warn the user when they are sending 'sensitive' fields over insecure
channels.

By performing a survey of large usage payment sites we could identify
common parameter names that are saved on major sites, then flag fields
such as name, address, credit card number,etc, related fields as being
"personal" data.

If we did this, would it be feasible to analyze user input into DOM
elements and raise warnings if personal data is entered into documents
loaded from "bad" sites? 

I haven't spent too much time thinking about it, but fields identified
as personal data from the survey could be fed into a bloom filter, and
then user input on "bad" sites could be checked against this filter to
determine if there is sensitive data in it.  This could help users to
better understand the context of our somewhat unfriendly bad certificate
error messages.

Thoughts?


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