Subject: Re: [TLS] [secdir] secdir review of

From: "Jeffrey A. Williams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:15:35 -0500 (GMT-05:00)

bob and all,

  I think Bob's exactly right here.  Thanks bob for being
so concise.  >:)

-----Original Message-----
>From: Robert Relyea <[email-masked]>
>Sent: Sep 24, 2010 5:00 PM
>To: [email-masked]
>Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
>Subject: Re: [TLS] [secdir] secdir review of
>
>On 09/24/2010 01:29 PM, Martin Rex wrote:
>> Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>>   
>>> For context, the "quoted advice" is mostly a description of current
>>> usage in some existing user agents. Incorporating Barry's suggestions,
>>> that text currently reads as follows in our working copy:
>>>
>>>       Security Note: Some existing interactive user agents give advanced
>>>       users the option of proceeding despite an identity mismatch.
>>>       Although this behavior can be appropriate in certain specialized
>>>       circumstances, in general it ought to be exposed only to advanced
>>>       users and even then needs to be handled with extreme caution, for
>>>       example by first encouraging even an advanced user to terminate
>>>       the connection and, if the advanced user chooses to proceed
>>>       anyway, by forcing the user to view the entire certification path
>>>       and only then allowing the user to accept the certificate on a
>>>       temporary basis (i.e., for this connection attempt and all
>>>       subsequent connection attempts for the life of the application
>>>       session, but not for connection attempts during future application
>>>       sessions).
>>>     
>> This whole paragraph is evil and completely wrong.
>>
>> It's bad enough that the web browser crowds replaced a useful option
>> and important security feature with an extremely evil scary page.
>>   
>
>No, this paragraph is exactly what should happen. Click through dialogs
>are demonsterably useless. They train users to ignore them. The only
>place for them is if you decide that validation is not necessary.
>> Offering to end-users, in a single-time-only leap-of-faith approach similar
>> to what SSH has been successfully doing since its invention to memorize
>> the peers certificate is magnitudes more secure than the endpoint
>> identification linking to one of a hundred trust anchors, provisionally
>> preconfigured by your software supplier.
>>   
>SSH is good for small numbers of point to point connections where the
>user controls both sides. SSH model is not appropriate for the general
>population connection to millions of webservers. That is why SSH is used
>extensively in admin deployments (where the admin controls both
>machines) and is not used for e-commerce. If you want that semantic use
>SSH. If you want security for the masses, use SSL (with full PKI).
>
>
>[ case where SSL is being used for an SSH use case deleted]
>
>bob
>

Regards,
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 300k members/stakeholders and growing, strong!)
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