Agreed but forcing phishers to generate key pairs, purchase
certificates, and/or buy-off CA vendor personnel creates additional
audit trails that could help in the tracking and prosecution of those
individuals. Combine this with certificate revocation and you have at
least a model that gives more verification, auditing, and remediation
than currently exists in the pursuit of these criminals. It's at least a
step in the right direction and shouldn't be avoided simply because it
won't immediately stop all phishing attacks or protect all users.

Watermarks do not stop all counterfeiting. Holograms do not stop all
credit card fraud. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can to help -
even if its only a partial solution.

Chip Andrews
http://www.sqlsecurity.com

>How does that help in practice? A user fooled by a link to ebay-support.com
>is just as likely to accept signed mail from foo (at) ebay-support (dot) com. [email concealed] Not to
>mention that the potential profits from phishing could easily finance the
>purchase of a forged cert if someone at one of the built-in CA's was
>corruptible. Given the several that are based in 3rd world companies (not to
>mention recent US corporate scandals) I have no confidence that won't
>eventually happen.
>
>-Dan Veditz
>
>
>
>

[ reply ]