Re: Uses for self-signed certificates (Was: Browser security warning)

A slightly different, but real, self-signed cert use case.

I help train one of my kid's football teams. We keep various
contact information etc on a web server and only share that
amongst team mentors. The information includes some sensitive
stuff, e.g. kid's phone numbers, some medical info (the number
of kids with "slight asthma" these days is amazing!); basically
the usual stuff that parents would not want published.

There is no-one anywhere who wants to have to pay for an
SSL-server cert for this purpose. Given the small scale of
the use-case, a self-signed cert is perfect for this.

I guess you could generalise this use-case to be "small
informal groups sharing sensitive information" or something
like that, and this differs from the furnace in that there's
a group of users involved and no devices.

Note: If I setup my own root CA and got the other team mentors
to trust that, then I would be very slightly increasing their
exposure, since then compromise of my CA/server would allow
the bad guy to introduce new servers to the other team mentors.
With a self-signed cert, compromise of my server has no effect
other than on content (apparently) rx'd from my server. However,
were setting up a root CA as easy as generating a self-signed
cert, then the difference would be ignorable. However, setting
up a root CA is not nearly as easy afaik.

And while these factoids are probably not relevant, the actual
use case also involves the following:-

	- sending group SMS messages, but we've not integrated
	that into my web server (I guess we could). Were group
	SMS integrated then there'd also be a potential cost
	issue for whoever's mobile is being billed once the free
	messages/month or whatever are used up (they do get used
	up)
	- the content in question will also tend to migrate from
	server to server, roughly in sync, with changes in
	employment or ISP or whatever, but that should probably
	be ignored
	- in our case, we also have a mailing list with an
	archive, but that's hosted, so proper certs are fine
	there, but I guess a variant might call for using the
	same self-signed cert for both web content and mail
	archive, in fact, I periodically send out the main
	https:// URL and the one and only http-basic username
	and password on that mailing list but that's an ok level
	of risk IMO (I guess one of the other mentors loses or
	forgets the password or changes computer or whatever
	every couple of months)

Stephen.

Received on Tuesday, 9 January 2007 13:29:18 UTC