Web Browser Developers Work Together on Security

JRiddell writes "Security developers for the four major browsers recently met together to discuss Web security. The meeting, hosted by Konqueror's George Staikos, looked at future plans to combat the security risks posed by phishing, ageing encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practise. IE 7 is one of the first browsers to implement some of the ideas discussed such as colour coding location bars and an anti-phishing database." From the article: "The first topic and the easiest to agree upon is the weakening state of current crypto standards. With the availability of bot nets and massively distributed computing, current encryption standards are showing their age. Prompted by Opera, we are moving towards the removal of SSLv2 from our browsers. IE will disable SSLv2 in version 7 and it has been completely removed in the KDE 4 source tree already."

Comments

Suggestion

[5, Troll]

These improvements sound good. But can I make a further suggestion?

Like many people, I have a few sites that I want complete assurance about, such as my personal banking sites. I don't want to simply trust a third-part CA to vet them, even if it is capable of providing high-assurance. As well as concerns about the business model for that CA, it still will sign a very large number of web-site certificates. If any of those web sites were compromised or the CA was tricked into signing a certificate, it opens an opportunity for the browser to say "highly trusted" when it isn't - and may even be a different web site if DNS could be compromised. And I expect it would take a long time, if possible at all, to persuade all sites to get the signed by one of the "blessed" CAs.

I much prefer the model used by the Petnames extension of Firefox (http://www.waterken.com/user/PetnameTool/), which allows me to register the server digital certificate thumbprint, and to give the site a nick-name ("My bank"). If the certificate changes in any way, I'll get warned and can do the appropriate checks. Effectively I'm managing my own white-list of a handful of sites, so don't need to trust someone else's whitelist of tens of thousands; or even worse a blacklist of far more.

This can co-exist with the proposals above; for example by allowing the user to store their trust relationship which then displays (say) a blue address bar. Other sites will go through the green / red / white display.

the four major browsers

[lethe1001]

IE 4, IE 5, IE6, and IE 7? Maybe you mean the 1 major browsers, and 3 other guys who like to talk about how major they're gonna be in a couple years.