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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: ssl auth failure gui: does "continue" do what I think it does?
From:       Matthew Woehlke <mw_triad () users ! sourceforge ! net>
Date:       2009-06-08 21:24:38
Message-ID: h0jvin$6sl$1 () ger ! gmane ! org
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Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> Self-signed certificates serve perfectly well for encryption,

Yes, but whose encryption? The point of an authority-issued certificate 
is that there is some level of assurance that it was obtained by someone 
honest and for the site it is reportedly for. As mpyne pointed out, in 
the typical case of a self-signed certificate), it's a crap-shoot that 
the connection isn't already compromised and you are getting the "real" 
certificate and not a compromised, "man-in-the-middle" certificate.

(Obviously, canonical CA's aren't the only issuing authorities. I can 
probably trust your self-signed certificate if you hand it to me on a 
USB stick in person, or use certified mail, or some other means of 
delivering the certificate that has a higher likelihood of security than 
simply visiting a web page. In which case I have probably already added 
your self-created signing authority to my trust store.)

 > But these are treated as "invalid" with a big scary warning to users.

As they should be. I think everyone agrees that "continue" is "not scary 
enough"?

Nicholas Tung wrote:
> Jeff Mitchell wrote:
>> I don't follow.  SSH works the same exact way.  When you connect
>> somewhere you don't know, it asks you to confirm this, then it stores
>> that confirmation.  This is like the Firefox behavior (except the
>> Firefox behavior requires four confirmations).  If a key changes, it
>> gives you a warning...just like Firefox if the cert changes from one
>> "invalid" cert to another.
> 
> Right, and one has to either edit the ssh command, or edit
> ~/.ssh/known_hosts, which is more complicated than saying "continue" (afaik
> it simply spits this message out and quits).

Actually, ssh just asks if you want to accept the key (at least for 
interactive logins, maybe for running a command it is different). But 
presumably (at least, historically) people using ssh know what they are 
doing.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
Current geek index: 62%

 
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