Joe Abley wrote:
On 2009-01-02, at 09:04, Rodrick Brown wrote:
A team of security researchers and academics has broken a core piece of Internet technology. They made their work public at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin today. The team was able to create a rogue certificate authority and use it to issue valid SSL certificates for any site they want. The user would have no indication that their HTTPS connection was being monitored/modified.
I read a comment somewhere else that while this is interesting, and good work, and well done, in practice it's much easier to social-engineer a certificate with a stolen credit card from a real CA than it is to create a fake CA.
(I'd give proper attribution if I could remember who it was, but it put things into perspective for me at the time so I thought I'd share.)
It is. But this issue might open for man-in-the-middle attacks, which is much harder for issued certificates. Issued certificates usually also incorporate a check, that you control a domain etc. With engineered certificates you can practically avoid that whole process. Kind regards, Martin List-Petersen -- Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobal an Iarthar http://www.airwire.ie Phone: 091-865 968