- From: Juuso Hukkanen <juuso_html5@tele3d.net>
- Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 16:31:37 +0000
>> In fact, do you know of *any* examples of MITM attacks >> being successfully used against a public website? > "Pharming" is effectively a man-in-the-middle, and in > particular would be 100% effective at defeating the proposed > security feature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharming Good point, I agree that *without* external authentication (see auth="verisign"), pharming, poisoned DNS router or various kinds of malicious software on users computer could lead UA into communicating with attackers site or allow MITM to open the encryption. But if external authentication service is using the auth="verisign" parameter, practical MITM attacks can be prevented. Someone said auth="verisign" would not suffice. No it doesn't... alone. I wanted the meta-encrypt footpring on pages to be small. So the actual CA company signed sertificate, which confirms pubkey="FAFFFA262662EAEEA" belonging to mydomainZZZ.com would be found from https://www.verisign.com/certificates/FAFFFA262662EAEEA.sig AND http://www.mydomainZZZ.com/verisign.sig As UA can verify the document's verisign signature and therefore observe site's certificate & public key being authentic and good for use. I am not saying this meta-encrypt tag would solve *most* security / privacy problems. I am just saying it would eliminate some of serious ones. Like salting the multi-used passwords that easily facilitate identity theft. For example a valid meta-encrypt tag could look like this: < /> i.e. NOTHING no tag at all. Meaning if a html5.01 standard would require user agents to, by default, salt the passwords using the domain name. sha256(userpass+domainname); Then all browsers that confirm to the html5.01 would submit the salted passwords. but if target website had for some (compability) reason a following meta-encrypt-tag <meta encrypt passsalt="no"/> Then a html5.01 conforming browser would submit the password in plain text as it was typed And if a site would e.g. change name and they wanted to use the old user-password-DB salted using the previous domain name, then the meta-encrypt-tag could be just... <meta encrypt passsalt="olddomain.com"/> And if a site would e.g. change name and they wanted to use the old user-password-DB salted using the previous domain name, then the meta-encrypt-tag could be just... <meta encrypt passsalt="olddomain.com"/> Thus a html5.01 conforming webpage could choose to use... <meta encrypt passsalt="current_domain_name.com"/> <meta encrypt passsalt=""/> <meta encrypt passsalt="yes"/> That password salting 'security feature' would not be threatened; no matter where a rogue DNS or pharming-tool would direct the UA. And as always there are still special threats against password salting, e.g. physical or software keyloggers. But hey nothing is perfect. The meta-encrypt tag, the passsalt="" argument alone, would have prevented facebook accounts and blogs of some of the leading finnish politicians being spied and vandalized - as recently happened after alypaa.com was hacked and 100,000+ username+passes were stolen. Ok that's all I want to say. Be well. Juuso Hukkanen www.colordev.com
Received on Saturday, 8 May 2010 09:31:37 UTC