On Wed, 28 Apr 2004, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
Matt Blaze said it well: "A commercial CA will protect you from anyone from whom they won't take money."
With current SSL implementations, you have to rely on all of the commercial CAs not taking the money. Any match wins.
verification that the spoof was detected. Is this good enough? What's your threat model...?
My threat model was simple :-) I wanted to reduce the messages in my logs about certificate verification failures. I could load a few widely used CA's or I could just turn certificate verification off (the default) and the messages would stop. Eric Rescorla gave a good talk at USENIX Security last year called "The Internet is Too Secure Already" http://www.rtfm.com/TooSecure-usenix.pdf Part of his talk was the threat model mismatch on the Internet. - Excessive concern with active attacks - Taking cryptanalytic attacks too seriously - Forgetting about other threats