THe Internet is Too Secure Already (was Re: Buying and selling root certificates)

Thu Apr 29 03:19:48 UTC 2004

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