With the advent of the CABforum as a trade group for commercial CAs designed to keep everyone out that isn’t looking to make a big buck out of others you’d think the browsers with their cries of standards and openness so they don’t get locked out by Microsoft wouldn’t be so quick to jump on this band wagon, but the complete opposite is true.

So what should we do as users, well as one person pointed out they plan to boycott all Microsoft products that contain additions to their software that supports EV certificates but we can do much more then that. Remember the only ones to benefit from this are large commercial CAs such as Verisign, and browsers via kick backs, although it seems Verisign has spun this so well they won’t need to pay anyone a cent.

This will effect the 99% of small businesses (or even medium sized business) that can’t justify spending the big bucks to get EV certificates, it will effect partnerships, sole traders and even in most cases Universities. If you ever expect to get an EV cert and you’re not a bank or big company, well forget it, even if you had the money to cover it, the standard is set so high that you wouldn’t be eligible in any case.

If you ever thought of running a business over the internet now is the time to have your say otherwise it could be too late to voice an opinion.

EV certs are being touted by Microsoft as preventing phishing, but as so few phishing attacks utilise SSL at present this claim is laughable at best.

Due to the growing demand, CAcert is currently growing it´s organisation structure to better handle the work. We decided to enable people to become product managers for the various products we have, and to create a couple of positions for officers dedicated to specific topics/tasks.

The available positions for Product Managers are:
Timestamping, OpenPGP signatures, X.509 certificates, Jabber certificates, Assurance System, Organisation Assurance, Revocation (OCSP+CRL), Digital Signatures, Electronic Invoices, SmartCards

The available areas for Officers:
Security Officer, System administration, Software Officer, Standardisation Officer, Human Ressources, Quality Officer, Public Relations Officer

If you are interested to help CAcert in any of the mentioned fields, please read about the details at http://wiki.cacert.org/wiki/ProductManagers and contact us.

Thanks for all your help!

Of late Verisign has been heavily pushing a new initiative for extended verification certificates, going so far as being on record criticising Mozilla for not keeping up with security innovations that Microsoft has already implemented, to give this some context, EV certificates are similar to the Class 3 certificates CAcert issues, minus the huge price tag.

While we applaud the effort to unify procedures and processes CAs employ we feel things have been heavily slanted towards commercial certificate authorities so much so that it seems to be more about keeping a strangle hold on the market and the price tag that comes with it then any actual improvements with security that end users might enjoy.

As a result, there is a number of flawed assumptions being pushed that can only be seen as helping out Verisign’s bottom line, not helping out end users, and while I can understand Microsoft’s motivations for accepting Verisign’s recommendations so openly, one must start to question Mozilla’s motives for even contemplating doing the same.

Now, if this was to truly help out users, surely we would hope for wide spread adoption, but this won’t be the case, even Verisign has expectations that 99% of sites will stick with the status quo. This becomes even more interesting when you take into account how this will be or is implemented in browsers.

Currently Firefox turns the URL bar yellow when the site is secured with SSL, with EV certificates the URL bar will turn green, this is supposed to indicate that the site is great and super and should be implicitly trusted, but if most sites are yellow users will tend to associate yellow as being just as good as green. We’ve seen this behaviour in the past with people simply clicking through any popups, which occur far too regularly and people only end up clicking without even reading them.

CAcert was aware at the time of discussions that occurred between most/all browser vendors and some certificate authorities, however when we asked to participate our requests largely fell on deaf ears.

The bigger problem here is with the Mozilla Foundation itself, well over a year ago, there was university trained researchers falling over themselves to help out the mozilla foundation, they had conducted real studies into how to improve the browser experience and way to help users to detect fraudulent websites. The Mozilla Foundation basically snubbed the researchers and their efforts at creating proof of concepts in the hope of having their research utilised for the benefit of everyone.

The research has since been incorporated in tool bars by HP and others for Internet Explorer.

It makes you wonder how much research Verisign and others have completed to back up their claims that this will help users?

This is yet another example of people being told what they need to be safe, when it’s most likely not going to do anything except convince businesses to spend more money with Verisign, so again I’m left wondering why the Mozilla Foundation is entertaining this current push by Verisign to lock out competitors, and has little or no benefit for users and businesses in general, even though helping users is the excuse being used as why this is needed.

Two assurers will be present at JDL, Lyon, oct. 13 & 14.

See  http://www.jdll.org/

—

Th. Thomas.