Re: [gentoo-user] This Connection is Untrusted: WAS: Firefox-10.0.1 fails to compile on x86

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 02/24/12 02:45, Florian Philipp wrote:
>>
>> Let's not forget that whenever you are presented with that warning, it
>> could also be a man-in-the-middle attack. Therefore just clicking on
>> "Accept" on every site is about the stupidest thing you can do.
>>
>> I'm unsure how the warning looks when you have previously accepted a
>> normally untrusted certificate on that site and now it is different
>> (which could be an indication of MITM). I hope there is a big red flashy
>> warning but I doubt it.
>>
>
> Not if the certificate is "valid."
>
> The only sane way to handle certificates with parties you've never met
> (i.e. every website) is the SSH method: you accept that, no matter what,
> there's always going to be one opportunity for a man-in-the-middle
> attack. The first time you connect, you save the remote server's
> certificate. If it changes, freak out.
>
> The certificate patrol extension does this:
>
>  http://patrol.psyced.org/
>
> With it, self-signed certificates become more secure than CA-signed ones.

Thanks for the link. The MultiZilla extension way back in the
Netscape/Mozilla/Seamonkey 1.x days treated certificates like this:
you had to approve all certs the first time, even if they were from a
trusted CA and if it ever changed for any reason, it would refuse to
connect unless you approved the new cert.

It seems to me that's how it should *always* work, in all software
that uses SSL certificates, but I understand wanting to keep it simple
for non-technical users... but those are the very users most at risk,
probably the most likely to use hostile wifi networks (in my mind,
hostile is anything other than the router I control at my house).

Additionally http://perspectives-project.org/ or
http://convergence.io/ can help you in establishing the initial trust
and are an attempt at eliminating the need to trust CAs at all.