New toy: SSLbar

[Steve Schear]

It's a toolbar for Mozilla (and related web browsers) that automatically 
displays the SHA1 or MD5 fingerprint of the SSL certificate when you visit 
an SSL secured web site. You could of course click the little padlock icon 
and dig through a couple of dialogs to see it, but it's much easier when 
it's right there in front of you on the toolbar.

So, what's the point?

If you look at the fingerprint of an SSL certificate, and compare this 
against a fingerprint that you obtain from the site's owner via another 
channel (IIP, email, PGP-signed web page, etc.) you can be absolutely 
certain that the certificate is legitimate, and that you are exchanging 
encrypted data with the persons(s) you intended to.

A more engaging description of the above - as well as SSLbar itself - can 
be found at 
<https://194.109.142.142:1984/redirect.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsslbar.metropipe.net>http://sslbar.metropipe.net

Enjoy.


"A Jobless Recovery is like a Breadless Sandwich."
-- Steve Schear 
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