Valid ... Invalid ... Nonsense.
The only meaningful thing the engine could do is check whether the certificate is the certificate it is supposed to be by looking at the public key contained therein.
A public key that has never before been seen in the real world, by anyone, anywhere, is a threat until proved otherwise. A public key that we have never seen before should not be trusted automatically, even if somebody else has encountered it in the past.
No change of public key should be allowed without human intervention to rationalize the legitimacy of the change. Automated 'Valid' / 'Invalid' determinations are absurd where there is a different public key that was trusted instead for the same entity in the past.
We need systems that warn us of key changes and give us the opportunity to pick up the phone or walk down the hall and find out why the entity we trust was forced to abandon a perfectly good key pair in favor of another.
Regards,
Jason Coombs
jasonc_at_science.org
_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Received on Feb 13 2005
Intro
