IP: SSL Certificate "Monopoly" Bears Financial Fruit

Lucky Green shamrock at cypherpunks.to
Sat Jul 13 23:55:22 EDT 2002


RJ Harvey wrote:
> Thanks for the tip!  I just got a new cert from Geotrust,
> and it was such an amazing contrast to those I've gotten
> from Verisign and Thawte!  They apparently take the 
> verification info from the whois data on the site, and you 
> really can do the process from start to finish in 10 minutes or so.

I believe that Geotrust has come up with an excellent new model to make
money out of the CA business with minimum hassle to the customer while
reducing Geotrust's vetting costs down to next to zero. Their
introduction of this new model was one of the more interesting news at
this year's otherwise rather bland RSA Conference.

> The cert shows that it's issued by Equifax, however.

The cert shows as being issued by Equifax because Geotrust purchased
Equifax's root embedded in major browsers since MSIE 5 on the secondary
market. (Geotrust purchased more than just the root).

--Lucky Green


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