On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> wrote: > On 02/24/12 02:45, Florian Philipp wrote: >> >> Let's not forget that whenever you are presented with that warning, it >> could also be a man-in-the-middle attack. Therefore just clicking on >> "Accept" on every site is about the stupidest thing you can do. >> >> I'm unsure how the warning looks when you have previously accepted a >> normally untrusted certificate on that site and now it is different >> (which could be an indication of MITM). I hope there is a big red flashy >> warning but I doubt it. >> > > Not if the certificate is "valid." > > The only sane way to handle certificates with parties you've never met > (i.e. every website) is the SSH method: you accept that, no matter what, > there's always going to be one opportunity for a man-in-the-middle > attack. The first time you connect, you save the remote server's > certificate. If it changes, freak out. > > The certificate patrol extension does this: > > http://patrol.psyced.org/ > > With it, self-signed certificates become more secure than CA-signed ones.
Thanks for the link. The MultiZilla extension way back in the Netscape/Mozilla/Seamonkey 1.x days treated certificates like this: you had to approve all certs the first time, even if they were from a trusted CA and if it ever changed for any reason, it would refuse to connect unless you approved the new cert. It seems to me that's how it should *always* work, in all software that uses SSL certificates, but I understand wanting to keep it simple for non-technical users... but those are the very users most at risk, probably the most likely to use hostile wifi networks (in my mind, hostile is anything other than the router I control at my house). Additionally http://perspectives-project.org/ or http://convergence.io/ can help you in establishing the initial trust and are an attempt at eliminating the need to trust CAs at all.
