Re: Kurt Seifred's article on securityportal

[Michael Sierchio]

Eric Rescorla wrote:

> This isn't a MITM attack, however.

Sorry, Eric --  if you don't know or trust the signer, then you only
know that the presenter (could be a MITM) has the private key associated 
with the pubkey in the cert.  This means that a MITM attack is entirely
possible.  Trust in the CA is required to assure the binding of the
SubjectPublicKeyInfo to the DN.  That's the feature that prevents
the MITM attack.  There's also the convention among browser implementations
that the CN should be the FQHN, which is a PITA for numerous reasons.

Of course, your browser presents no warnings whatsoever for certs
signed by any number of CAs that are "trusted" simply because their
root certs are bundled with the browser.  And unless you manually
retrieve a CRL,  you only know that a cert was valid when it was
issued.
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