On 02/04/12 20:34, Ryan Lane wrote:
It's also possible for governments to snoop on HTTPS communications, by using a private key from a trusted CA to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. Apparently the government of Iran has done this.
We really should publish our certificate fingerprints. An attack like this can be detected. An end-user being attacked can see if the certificate they are being handed is different from the one we advertise. We could also provide a convergence notary service (or one of the other things like convergence).
Indeed. Detecting a potential MITM is useless if you can't determine if it's real or not. For instance the switch from RapidSSL to DigiCert certificate was quite suspicious.
I don't know how to best publicise it, though. I suppose we would list them somewhere like https://secure.wikimedia.org/servers.html but if nobody knows it's there...