On 2 Jan 2009, at 12:33, Joe Greco wrote:
We cannot continue to justify security failure on the basis that a
significant percentage of the clients don't support it, or are
broken in
their support. That's an argument for fixing the clients.
At a more basic level, though, isn't failure guaranteed for these kind
of clients (web browsers) so long as users are conditioned to click OK/
Continue for every SSL certificate failure that is reported to them?
If I was attempting a large-scale man-in-the-middle attack, perhaps
I'd be happier to do no work and intercept 5% of sessions (those who
click OK on a certificate that is clearly bogus) than I would to do an
enormous amount of work and intercept 100% (those who would see no
warnings). And surely 5% is a massive under-estimate.
Joe