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Become an SSLAdmin In a Few Easy Steps

Posted by Soulskill on from the chain-of-trust dept.

Renderer of Evil writes "With news that it is rather simple to mimic authority with many webmail providers in order to coax an SSL certificate authority into creating one for the domain, a Canadian security expert has decided to take it upon himself to see who out there is actually vulnerable and provide information to the public on how prevalent this issue is as we speak. Out of eleven webmail services chosen at random and without prejudice, just under half of them permitted him to register with credentials (ssladmin) that allowed him to create an SSL certificate in their name. In most of these cases, there was a pre-existing, legitimately-acquired certificate." Update: 04/19 01:30 GMT by S : Kurt Seifried's original paper, on which the BetaNews article is based, provides more detailed information on the subject (PDF).

1 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Misleading half-truth as usual by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    The solution is easy and is used by decent SSL cert authorities (those who don't use it should lose the license to do be a cert authority).

    Mail the confirmation only to the email address listed in the WHOIS record for the domain name.

    Also, the moron praised Firefox for displaying the color bars. Internet Explorer does that too.