On 12/08/2011 12:37 AM, Michal Zalewski wrote: > > For time being, if you make security decisions based on onmouseover > tooltips, link text, or anything along these lines, and do not examine > the address bar of the site you are ultimately interacting with, there > is very little any particular web application can do to save you: you > are just at a significant risk wherever you go. If you take away open > redirectors, a myriad of other, comparable ways to fool you remain, > and can't be fixed easily.
I think reasoning based on this is subtly fallacious and it often contributes to disagreements between researchers and large vendors. This is how we got into the state of the web today: bad faith on the part of browser vendors. They may be in the minority, but there *are* users out there who know how to look at the address bar. The security researcher knows this because he is one of them. I call this group the "competent and contentious users". Large vendors are constantly holding bad faith against their userbase. This may be borne out by large user studies, but I've lost count of the number of times I've heard actual security improvements shot down because "typical users" are presumed to be so incompetent and careless that they will fail to derive a significant benefit from it. I maintain that design decisions affecting security must be driven by the needs of the competent and contentious user because if he cannot achieve effective security in using of the system, then what chance has the "typical user"?! Avoiding security improvements because the are perceived as being of little benefit to type typical user is wrong. Doing so gains nothing for the typical users, it decreases the security available to competent and contientious users, and worst of all it actively removes any incentives for the "typical user" to begin to take responsibility for their own security. I think when the "typical user" gets pwned with phishing or malware he thinks a combination of "stupid Microsoft", "the Internet is out to get me", and "what did I do wrong?". The vendor implicitly answers: "you did nothing wrong because this is all too complicated for you to understand, you should install this additional product to give you better security". Perhaps this made sense back when the Internet was a toy and the biggest security risk was a limited-liability credit card number, but today we have whole populations in places like Iran wondering if their ass is going to get tortured over something they said on social media. I think a lot of typical users today are probably wanting to move into that other category and we should support them in that. - Marsh _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/