No More SSL Revocation Checking For Chrome

New submitter mwehle writes with this bit from Ars Technica: "Google's Chrome browser will stop relying on a decades-old method for ensuring secure sockets layer certificates are valid after one of the company's top engineers compared it to seat belts that break when they are needed most. The browser will stop querying CRL, or certificate revocation lists, and databases that rely on OCSP, or online certificate status protocol, Google researcher Adam Langley said in a blog post published on Sunday. He said the services, which browsers are supposed to query before trusting a credential for an SSL-protected address, don't make end users safer because Chrome and most other browsers establish the connection even when the services aren't able to ensure a certificate hasn't been tampered with."

Comments

Re:Why?

[Baloroth]

Hint: should every site with an SSL cert from X not work because X is unreachable for whatever reason right this second?

Yes. Anyone conducting a MITM attack is practically necessarily in control of the users network, and will just block access to the CRL, which means they will never stop MITM attacks unless you do exactly that. And yes, I know that is the point of the change. My point is: they choose the wrong fix. Sites should only be listed as trusted if the browser really knows they can be (so far as possible, of course). Being "Secure" should meet a minimum standard, and failing that standard means the site should not be listed as "secure", but most browsers do. Choosing to simply ignore part of the established SSL standard is not the solution.

Opera does precisely this. It still used HTTPS (I think), but it doesn't list the page as being secure, since the page really has exactly the same security as any non-https site (for trust purposes).