SSL certificates and MD5 collisions

Posted Jan 15, 2009 9:25 UTC (Thu) by Trou.fr (subscriber, #26289)
In reply to: SSL certificates and MD5 collisions by HenrikH
Parent article: SSL certificates and MD5 collisions

I have been wishing for such a feature for year. The way OpenSSH does it is perfect. I do trust my personnal certificate hash storage more than CAs, their search for profit prevents accurate verification of identities.

The probability that the site I visit was not showing the right certificate the first time I connected to it is very low and comparing the hash is adding a really useful security layer. Defense in depth.

SSL certificates and MD5 collisions

Posted Jan 15, 2009 15:06 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Beyond the profit motive, privacy concerns and scalability issues prevent CAs from really verifying identities usefully. In order for them to give useful verification, they'd have to not issue certificates to anyone other than my bank and credit card company; otherwise, there's the risk that some other entity will have a confusing site that makes me think that it's my bank when it is actually something else. Since the CA doesn't know what bank I use, and since it wants to be useful to customers of other banks, this is impossible.