White-listing vs black-listing

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White-listing vs black-listing
by Andrew Yeomans on Tuesday 22/Nov/2005, @01:25

The above improvements sound good. But can I make a further suggestion?

Like many people, I have a few sites that I want complete assurance about, such as my personal banking sites. I don't want to simply trust a third-part CA to vet them, even if it is capable of providing high-assurance. As well as concerns about the business model for that CA, it still will sign a very large number of web-site certificates. If any of those web sites were compromised or the CA was tricked into signing a certificate, it opens an opportunity for the browser to say "highly trusted" when it isn't - and may even be a different web site if DNS could be compromised. And I expect it would take a long time, if possible at all, to persuade all sites to get the signed by one of the "blessed" CAs.

I much prefer the model used by the Petnames extension of Firefox (http://www.waterken.com/user/PetnameTool/), which allows me to register the server digital certificate thumbprint, and to give the site a nick-name ("My bank"). If the certificate changes in any way, I'll get warned and can do the appropriate checks. Effectively I'm managing my own white-list of a handful of sites, so don't need to trust someone else's whitelist of tens of thousands; or even worse a blacklist of far more.

This can co-exist with the proposals above; for example by allowing the user to store their trust relationship which then displays (say) a blue address bar. Other sites will go through the green / red / white display.

Related Links

·   Articles on Konqueror
·   Also by Andrew Yeomans
·   Contact author

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Re: White-listing vs black-listing
by kL on Tuesday 22/Nov/2005, @12:46

Certificates protect against hijacked DNS. It's a two-way authentication.

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Re: White-listing vs black-listing
by Chase Venters on Tuesday 22/Nov/2005, @14:16

Yes, they do, but this Petnames business can protect against something *else*. Say I set a Petname for amazon.com to be 'Amazon Bookstore'. Now some tricky email directs me to amafon.com, and I'm blind, so I don't see the s/z/f/. The Petname 'Amazon Bookstore' will *not* come up, making it obvious I'm not at Amazon.

Note of course that there will be a nice yellow lock icon anyway, because Amafon.com has bought a security certificate certifying that they are Amafon.com.

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