Re: "The End of SSL and SSH?"

[Darren Reed <avalon () COOMBS ANU EDU AU>]

In some mail from Martin Rex, sie said:
[...]
> (1) the significance of a secure key storage.
>
>   SSL:  All Web-Browsers that I know keep Root-CA certificates in software
>         and it is quite possible for software to modify Root-CA certs
>       or to add new Root-CA certs, which subverts the whole
>         PKI trust model.

No, it just subverts the implementation whereby the browser doesn't
bother you if it can find a path back to a root-CA for a X.509 cert
associated with whatever cert it has been given.

For Netscape there is a builtin MIME type that cannot be disabled
which invokes the root CA installation code.  10:1 most people would
click "ok" to install a root CA if so prompted from a random web site.
Now that's without even doing anything nasty.

[...]
>   SSL:  Web-Browsers area shipped with >100 preconfigured CA certs
>         these days.  Most Browsers can be downloaded via the Internet,
>         but many of the distributions are still not signed --
>         how do you know they haven't been backdoored with additional
>         Root-Certs?

How do you know there is any integrity at all in those preconfigured ?
What's to say that 10 of them aren't controlled by some mafia ?  I'll
let the conspiracy theorists goto town on that note.

Darren