as pure asside ... any SSL server certificate signed by any CA in my browswer's CA list is acceptable. for list of current valid signing CA's in a typical browswer see: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay4.htm#comcert14 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay4.htm#comcert16 my broswer makes no distinction on which CA signed what ... and/or even what they signed. If I get a certificate signed by any CA in my browswers list that says foo.bar ... and I think i'm connecting to foo.bar ... then the SSL connection will go thru. given that the supposed justification for SSL certificates is weaknesses in the domain name infrastructure integrity ... and they beef up the domain name infrastructure integrity (in part so that SSL certificate issuing operations ... like any from the above list ... can rely on domain names not having been hijacked) ... then it eliminates that as a business case & justification for SSL certificates. There are a lot of short-comings of the existing SSL certificate infrastructure. To a large extent, most PKI definitions are purely hypothetical (there is the line someplace, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is) ... trivial example is that most PKI definitions include things like CRLs for dealing with revoked or compromised certificates/private keys ... and yet the SSL infrastructure doesn't have any of that in it (even tho client checking of server SSL domain certificates accounts for 99.999999% of all such PKI operations that occur in the world today). Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk> on 11/19/2000 05:03:20 AM This is not a comment on the crapness of PKI, it is a comment on the crapness of Verisign. The two are far from synonymous. Don't get me wrong - I don't think PKI is a perfect solution by any means - however, it gets us nowhere to attribute the faults of others to PKI. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff