Ian G wrote:
As far as I know it was Netscape that invented SSL. They picked a scheme
that was provably secure (from math point of view), which was good.
Yes, it was Netscape. The first version was not so good,
so I hear, and SSL v2 was pretty good and that stuck well
enough to last until now. I have no idea what it means to
be provably secure, maths wise, that's an idea that people
played around with in the 90s, but these days it's fallen
out of favour I hear, partly for reasons of security failures
that we see here and now.
Hey, wait, that's absolutely wrong!! Crypto is still much based on
provable security, and most of my work, in particular, is in this area.
If you have no idea, don't make statements, or better yet learn -
provable security takes time and effort and is not applicable always,
but it is a great tool and also trains the mind.
It's hard to really state this without getting into a big long
net argument, but here goes: we know a lot more about
secure protocols than we did then. We also know a lot
more about threats. If we sat down and re-did the whole
lot, it wouldn't look anything like what you see now.
Huh? I think TLS is a pretty solid protocol, and while there are some
aspects that could be improved (like auth-then-encrypt choice), they are
relatively minor. I teach it both as an improtant protocol as well as a
good one. True, no complete proof yet, but just give us some time.
And comparing SSH and SSL is not totally fair - usage differs. It is
Anyway new SSH is simply using SSL/TLS so this seems irrelevant.
(We need to be careful not to let the strength of the
SSL protocol blind us from the weakness(es) of the
secure browsing system in the browser. I.e., SSL
may be provably secure, math wise, but secure
browsing is provable insecure, money wise.)
Now you make sense.
...
but the minimum necessary. What browser manufacturers
did was the logical thing - they reduced the security
component on the chrome over time until it had all
but disappeared. No threat, so no point in it being
there.
Are you inventing history here? I don't remember what the early
browser's looked like, but was there really more security in the early days?
Originally the lock was more prominent
Correct, in particular, it was not omitted in unprotected page as it is
these days. OTOH, recent changes in FF did improve visibility.
and the CA
was supposed to be named as the one who you could
rely upon. I don't recall it myself, but Bob Relyea
mentioned it.
Yes, but I think that was only in the pre-release.
Best, Amir Herzberg
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