Public Key Infrastructure: An Artifact...

[Bram Cohen]

On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, Ben Laurie wrote:

> Bram Cohen wrote:
> > 
> > Unless that problem is fixed, man in the middle is hardly made more
> > difficult - for example, Mallory could break into some random machine on
> > the net and steal it's public key, then hijack local DNS and when someone
> > goes to amazon.com redirect them to amazon.hackeddomain.com, and then
> > proxy to amazon.com - now even SSL says the connection is safe.
> 
> Yes, and Mallory can't read the data - so what was the point?

Yes he can - he's presenting the key for hackeddomain.com, which he stole,
so he's quite capable of reading requests sent for it.

-Bram Cohen