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

Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams@oracle.com> Wed, 30 June 2010 22:09 UTC

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Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:10:15 -0500
From: Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams@oracle.com>
To: aerowolf@gmail.com
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Subject: Re: [TLS] Eleven out of every ten SSL certs aren't valid
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On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 02:33:50PM -0700, aerowolf@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams@oracle.com> wrote:
> >If it turns out that 97% of sites that accept credit card payments have
> >invalid certs (in some way or another), then we'd definitely have a
> >problem.  I suspect that's not the case though.
> 
> I expect that this is a major move of "sleight of hand" to distract us
> from a more serious threat: that many sites that accept credit card
> payments have domain-validated certificates, with no true ownership
> information.

"Sleight of hand" is much too strong.  I think this study is a great
place to start.  The methodology needs some improvement (see various
posts), but we can't really be drawing conclusions about motivation (or
did I misunderstand you?) from the study's shortcomings.

Nico
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