[Ach] StartSSL for Business Sysadmins

[Philipp Gühring]

Hi,


> SSH can put up with click-thru syndrome because of its narrow domain.
> It works, because the user is the sysadm or knows the sysadm, and can
> ask when a click-thru is appropraite.
> 
> SSL however cannot;  it totally breaks the security model, and leaves
> wide open to the anticipated threat model -- MITM, aka phishing.

The problem we have here I think is HTTPS, not SSL.

https:// expects a secure connection to an authenticated server.
http:// does not expect any authentication from the server.
So we could easily use SSL opportunistically with anon-dh for http://

I guess that this might be what Google is (or could be) actually doing
with their SPDY protocol.
SPDY is used for http:// and https://, and every SPDY connection is
encrypted with TLS. So it effectively places a TLS underneath normal http://.
My guess is that they are using anon-dh for http:// and authenticated
ciphersuites for https:// then, but I couldn't read that out of the
documentation at the moment.
If anyone wants to research that question and could let me know about it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY

If this is the case, then we should propose that that people should use
SPDY, so that they get opportunistic encryption for http://

Best regards,
Philipp Gühring