North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Non-English Domain Names Likely Delayed

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Mon Jul 18 22:42:59 2005 
On 18 Jul 2005, at 18:43, Jason Sloderbeck wrote:



I don't know of any other IEEE/NANOG/IETF/ICANN-sanctioned method to
completely confuse even a savvy IT user who is trying to determine the
validity of an SSL site.
If I was feeling especially cynical (and hey, who isn't on a Monday?) I'd say that the validity of an SSL site is a lot harder to judge than people think, and a savvy IT user would do well to trust very few of them.

For a well-known common name with a global reputation, you might have a reasonable expectation that a successful wander down a certificate chain might be worth trusting: a CA would have to be fairly remiss to issue a certificate to some random customer who claimed to be Amazon or Microsoft (or Am�zon or Micr�soft, for that matter).

However, when it comes to a web store whose name isn't well-known, "good certificate" frequently means little more than "the operator of the site is able to mark up some letterhead and send a fax".

And of course, nobody here would be guilty of clicking "accept" on a warning that the validity of a self-signed certificate cannot be determined. Thought not.

Maybe a bit of healthy distrust is overdue for injection into the CA economy.


Joe