New Extended SSL Certs Make Online Debut

An anonymous reader writes "The first of the new 'extended validation' SSL certificates went live this week, signaling the latest effort by the browser makers and major Web sites to further verify the identity of SSL applicants and help consumers spot fraudulent Web sites, the Washington Post's Security Fix blog notes. The technology is pretty simple: Visit a login page for a site that uses one of these EV certs and the browser bar turns green; likewise, the browser's anti-phishing filters can turn the URL field red when the user is at a known phishing site. There is still quite a bit of debate over whether this whole scheme isn't just a new money-making racket for the SSL providers, and whether small mom-and-pop shops will be able to afford the pricey new certs."

Comments

There are many problems - some are legacy problems

[fyngyrz]

As far as I understand, the main trouble for mom'n'pop shops will be the green colored bar

It is far worse than that:

• This encourages people to "trust" Internet Explorer, which has not earned that trust in any meaningful sense
• This encourages people to "trust" Verisign and others, which have also not earned that trust in any meaningful sense
• This discourages customers from checking out an online shop themselves, which is just plain really, really bad
• This certificate is an additional expense not just in obvious costs, but in hoop jumping
• If a legitimate business is unable to obtain the cert, it will be unfairly damaged by the incorrect presumption of unreliability
• Certificates never provide anything more valuable than data security, the "identification" is illusory and worse with these, since they create an "underclass" of nominally "untrusted" sites that have no performance reason to be so classed, which is the very definition of an inaccurate take on who is trustworthy
• The idea that "trust" in one corporation can be settled merely by the endorsement of another is logically and realistically false
• Browsers, by buying into this corporate scam, have been complicit in hurting the Internet's ability to do business, not in helping it; this is because historically, identification of "who is trusted" has been poorly done by underdoing (in other words, give us a check, we'll give you a cert... just a scam, no ID involved) now we have a scam where it will be overdone, so that perfectly legitimate businesses will be left out in the cold. Again, the idea that a corporation can be trusted to do your due diligence on checking out someone you want to do business with is wrong from its very roots.

In the end, the benefit of SSL is that of encrypted traffic. The data goes from the client to the server, and nowhere else. That's what a certificate actually ensures. Nothing else. Not one blessed thing. The people who built this scam were either miserably uninformed and/or confused, or underhanded types who recognized the money to scooped up from people who could not afford to have a browser inaccurately claim that their business "might be a scam."

This is just one more case where superficial thinking about something is being used as an excuse to generate a large and healthy cash cow over and above the current certificate scam. Nothing can legitimately substitute for you checking for complaints, longevity, experience with the product(s) you are interested in, that sort of thing. Which in turn means that by definition, the foisting off on the consumer that the "browser bar turning green" means "shopping or interaction is OK" is outright illegitimate.

And will any of that stop this from happening? Not a chance. Because it isn't only the consumers that are failing to do due diligence here; it is the browser writers as well, and as per usual, we start with Microsoft who does not have the consumer's best interests at heart.

The attempt is being made here to do something that is impossible. Wy? Because an operation that was trustworthy yesterday can become untrustworthy tomorrow. Likewise, an operation that was controlled by scammers can replace those people. It is a matter of people and goals that no one can see through the veil of the Internet. This is aside from the creation of a "ghetto" of untrusted merchants who cannot get certified, or cannot afford to get certified.

I saw a comment elsewhere here by some moron who was pontificating about how "if some business cannot afford $500 for this cert, I would not trust them, etc. ad nauseam." The fact is, some businesses are striving on the edge and that money is important to them. Seeing as how it does nothing for them but keep them from being creamed by this new scam - meaning, it doesn't add value to what they do, just brings them back to a status quo