Law Enforcement Appliance Subverts SSL
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The real news will be if anyone can prove that a default CA has been compelled by court order to generate a fake certificate.
2. If you are capable of doing this, you are also capable of attacking the automated verification methods that low-assurance/domain-validated CAs use. For example, if you can spoof DNS for a domain, you can send the CA MX records that direct all validation email to the domain to your own server. Or, if you're a government, you can work with the target's email provider and/or domain name registrar and/or anybody else willing to help; then they could get forged certificates without the cooperation or knowledge of the CA.
The idea was that the client would install this device on their perimeter, generate a CA certificate for the device (on the device itself) and then install this CA cert on all internal clients. In other words the clients were assumed to be cooperating.
From the technical perspective it was a piece of cake. The project got shelved still, but only because they have failed to close the sale of the product.
Your argument might make sense if it was law enforcement making the request. But do you really think companies should ignore court orders?
The question is how WebTrust would treat this type of theoretical issue.
I'm game if someone else is.
I hope I never suffer a brain cramp and say that about my company to a reporter.
PGP is nice in that it bundles key distribution together with authentication, so you can at least be sure that the person you spoke to first is the same person you're speaking to now, assuming nobody's taken a $5 wrench to their knees. Unfortunately, PGP and all other factoring based key distribution methods are only secure for a limited time. People often say things like, "Secure for 1000 years assuming..." What they don't tell you is those assumptions (e.g. crackers only use classical computers with Moore's law scaling resources and currently known algorithms") are ridiculous. In general, advances in algorithms alone accelerate things greatly. Messages you send in PGP today will probably be trivial to crack within a decade, and that's not even accounting for quantum computing! Note: If you are interesting enough, this translates to messages you send today will be logged, archived, and cracked within 10 years. This is fine for credit card transactions. Not so fine for government secrets. (If you ever hear of a government employee transmitting state secrets using PGP, you are well justified to freak out.)
Quantum Cryptography promises to at least get rid of that problem, since the impossibility of cloning quantum information means that keys cannot be archived and cracked at a later time. However, authentication with a party you have not physically met remains a bit of a pickle.
Wouldn't she be required by U.S. law to say this if that's what the government told her to say?
[Edit: Seems I'm out of date; the gag-order provisions I was thinking about were ruled unconstitutional a couple of years ago: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/court-rules-patriot-ac...]
P.S. God, I hate this copy/paste Read More crap.