Is cryptography where security took the wrong branch?

Eric Rescorla ekr at rtfm.com
Sun Sep 7 17:13:31 EDT 2003


Ben Laurie <ben at algroup.co.uk> writes:

> Eric Rescorla wrote:
> > Incidentally, when designing SHTTP we envisioned that credit
> > transactions would be done with signatures. I would say that
> > the Netscape guys were right in believing that confidentiality
> > for the CC number was good enough.
> 
> I don't think so. One of the things I'm running into increasingly with
> HTTPS is that you can't do an end-to-end check on a cert. That is, if I
> have some guy logging into some site using a client cert, and that site
> then makes a back-end connection to another site, there's no way it can
> prove to the back-end site that it has the real guy online (without
> playing nasty tricks with the guts of SSL, anyway), and there's
> certainly no way to prove that some particular response came from him.
> Signing stuff would deal with this trivially.

Well, I'd certainly like to believe that this is true, since
it would mean that Allan and I were right all along. :)

-Ekr

-- 
[Eric Rescorla                                   ekr at rtfm.com]
                http://www.rtfm.com/

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