Does your Certifying Authority have a clue who you are? Do they care?

Fri Dec 5 16:55:56 UTC 2003


>There is an expectation that URLs which do not produce "this 
>certificate is not trusted" messages are safe for people to use to 
>disclose sensitive information like credit card numbers. The average 
>consumer has been educated to this effect at great length by 
>commerce-oriented websites and browser vendors.

	Sorry, this is the night soil of a large and very well fed
male ox. Anyone who believes that more than 20% of the users have been
educated to do this hasn't gone around spoofing their own https sites
on their wireless lans and measuring how many passwords they get. and
I'm being *generous* with the 20% - I typically get a valid password 9
out of 10 connections to a spoof site.
	     
	 What lusers have been educated to do is "Oh look, an annoying
box has popped up. click the button to make it go away so I can keep
going." I seriously doubt they differentiate it too much from popup
ads for porn sites or herbal viagra.

	   -Bob