Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
You aren't paranoid enough. What if the spoofer is also a system
administrator at the bank with access to a copy of the real certificate
that he installs on the machine he's tricked your dns into reaching -
with the expected name that you'll still see.
Then the bank has failed to protect its secret key. I expect banks to
have rigorous security routines to control who can access sensitive
systems, and to be able to check afterwards who did what.
Yes, but controlling 'who does what' only works as long as the selected
person does what you expect. Are you following the case of the San
Francisco network admin that refused to give the password to anyone
else? This may not even be malicious (he may just think everyone else
would screw it up), but it isn't what anyone expected.
Could you elaborate on how whois guards against malicious system
administrators?
It spreads the number of things that have to be compromised to fool you.
The person who had access to copy the security certificate may not be
the same one that registers the public DNS servers. Maybe it's a backup
operator who knows how to restore a copy elsewhere
>> Do you think security could be improved by having
browsers and other programs make whois queries automatically?
Slightly, but the DNS infrastructure probably would not handle having
every query send to an authoritative source, which is why we have the
caches that can be compromised in the first place.
Also, if it is the a system administrator at the bank, what is to
prevent him from just changing the real name servers?
That's visible and would leave traces in obvious places.
> Or putting in a
program on the bank's web server to capture the username and password
when you enter them?
Likewise.
Lets face it, if a bank employee wants to embezzle
money from the bank, there is not much we as costumers can do about it.
But you need to trust the combination of DNS and the target certificate.
If DNS can be compromised someone then only needs to have a copy of
the certificate in a place that will be hard to find after the DNS cache
expires.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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