Re: Secure Chrome (and secure browsing mode)

On 2006-06-15 00:55:02 -0400, George Staikos wrote:

>   Excellent points.  I also realized that some of us are
>   talking about different things here.  Some of us are
>   talking about protecting users, others are talking about
>   preventing successful phishes.  I think they're both 
>   excellent goals, and are not identical.  We should make it
>   hard to phish, and that will make it hard to harm users.
>   We should attempt to protect users, at least the most
>   vigilant to start, and that will make it hard to phish
>   them.  They are complementary things but may require
>   slightly different approaches.  Blacklists don't make it
>   hard to phish, just annoying.  They do go a long way 
>   toward protecting users though.  On the other hand,
>   closing software security holes doesn't directly protect
>   all users, but it does make it harder to phish since there
>   are fewer vectors and probably more tedious ones left.  We
>   need to tackle both of these things, and find effective
>   ways to do it, especially without confusing the two too
>   much.

Excellent analysis.

The things that I'd think would be most useful to do (doing in
the sense of having a working group about them) in order to
meet the goal of helping vigilant ("suspicious", whatever we
call them) users:

- Define a baseline set of security context information that
  will be presented consistently, across browsers, e.g., "pick
  these elements from your X.509 certs", "add that information
  from whateversecurityprotocolcomesnext";
- define best practices for how to present them nicely,
  non-scarily and usably;
- define requirements that list precisely what browsers should
  not let content do to user interface elements, in particular
  those that are used to present security relevant context.

Comments welcome.

Regards,
-- 
Thomas Roessler, W3C   <tlr@w3.org>

Received on Thursday, 15 June 2006 08:10:51 UTC