Jean-Marc Desperrier wrote:
Ian G wrote:
[...] Enforcing cert/PKCS11 cleanliness is not a costless choice, personally I'd rather have a whole bunch of flakey chains and people using them to send emails that are at least encrypted than to not grant access to crypto tech [...]
Sorry, but if the chain is flakey, then the crypto tech doesn't deliver what it promises, and if people begin to really trust and make use of it, then it wont be long before it's abused.
When I say "not costless" I mean you are facing an equation whereby the "secure" system is in use in <1% of downloaded Tbirds, and secures <1% of emails. As opposed to a potential world where 100% of downloads could have the capability, and 10% of emails might trigger it. So 10% of emails being protected from flakey crypto chains is still way more secure than <1% protected by "secure" crypto chains.
Then what happens is, of that 10%, 0.01% of the emails get abused, we work out how and why, and we fix it. So we are still ahead.
It's all about risk and return. The "no-risk security" model results in almost no-one being secured. The "opportunistic security" model results in almost everyone being secured.
You pick!
And once it has been abused, it will never regain user's confidence, just like the abuses with Active X have ruined user's confidence, whatever step are taken now to secure them.
Yes, see Phishing.
Luckily, even though phishing is a bit of an epidemic, few people realise that it is the browser's security model that is being breached. In a sense, there is still time to address this, before the press notices ... but your point is well taken, user confidence in browsing is on the way down due to 3 factors: the OS insecurity, the browser insecurity, and the phishing thing. The first two can be and are being addressed by buying a Mac and downloading firefox. For the third, there is only the yellow bar on firefox, and the tiny padlock down the bottom.
It's not enough to address phishing, there remains much to be done!
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