-- James A. Donald
Or to say the same thing in different words -- why can't HTTPS be more like SSH? Why are we seeing a snow storm of scam mails trying to get us to login to e-g0ld.com?
Eric Rescorla
Because HTTPS is designed to let you talk to people you've never talked before, which is an inherently harder problem than allowing you to talk to people you have.
James A. Donald:
In attempting to solve the hard problem, it fails to make provision for solving the easy problem.
Eric Rescorla
Nonsense. One can simply cache the certificate, exactly as one does with SSH. In fact, Mozilla at least does exactly this if you tell it to. The reason that this is uncommon is because the environments where HTTPS is used are generally spontaneous and therefore certificate caching is less useful.
Certificate caching is not the problem that needs solving. The problem is all this spam attempting to fool people into logging in to fake BofA websites and fake e-gold websites, to steal their passwords or credit card numbers --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG /UOLlqGTeq9SAB5W/aJJuwULFBNMCVzKJnIRlhES 48E3I0Yo+68OTvTwztxirTXc41yFVicJtskuBB/dU