Re: [TLS] Eleven out of every ten SSL certs aren't valid

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

"Steingruebl, Andy" <[e-mail]> writes:

>The problem of course is that this is purely anecdotal.  Cormac didn't cite
>any research pointers for that, and it is at the heart of the current debate.

You mean the fifty-three references he gave weren't enough?  (OK, most of them
aren't to evaluations of the effects of cert warnings, but several are).  A
related problem is that there's been so much work done on the (lack of)
effects of cert warnings, and certs in general, that he could have spent half
the paper just regurgiating all the existing work.

(I'm dreading someone asking "OK, list all these refs" because then I'll have
to go away and spend several hours digging them all up... how many do people
want before they say "OK, that's enough"?.  Cormac's paper has about eight,
and that's barely scratching the surface).

>Frankly, if you think most certificate warnings are false positives, and you
>also believe that they will forever be such, then why do any certificate
>verification at all?

Precisely.  Users just click past them anyway.  Let's just admit that what
users are getting now is effectively unauth'd DH and then try and give them
something that actually works.

>This line of reasoning essentially says "there aren't really any active MITM
>attackers, and won't ever be" so let's just do away with the whole mess of
>ever checking certificates.

No, it says that what we're doing doesn't work, has never worked, and as far
as anyone can tell will never work (and we have a multibillion(?) dollar
global cybercrime indistry to prove it), so lets look for alternatives that do
work.  So we can do away with the mess of certs not because there aren't any
attacks but because they cost a ton of money and effort without actually
working.

(That's one statistic I'd like to see, if there are X sites using CA-bought 
certs costing an average of $Y and it takes a site admin A time at $B an hour, 
how much is the PKI phantomime costing per year?  Cormac has already given 
figures for how much clicking past all the warnings costs on the user side, 
but what does it cost to create the mess in the first place?).

Peter.