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The problem I see is a false sense of security: Users will just see a lock in their address bar and think they're safe -- even if they're on a phishing site wit
by beefhash 12y ago
The problem I see is a false sense of security: Users will just see a lock in their address bar and think they're safe -- even if they're on a phishing site with a self-signed certificate.
It appears that users have been conditioned to look out for at least that little lock symbol, so devaluing it now would throw a lot of user training down the drain and give phishers fresh wind.
- caw 12y agoI think we could get some kind of intermediate state though - Red is the expired/invalid cert, yellow could be valid self-signed (where you don't trust the issuer), and green is fully validated trust.
- rprospero 12y agoWhy not then just treat the page like it's unencrypted? For the users trained to look for the lock icon, they could look up to the bar and see it marked like an unencrypted page. I've just seen the false sense of security argument backfire. I remember a sysadmin performing a "security upgrade" by converting a self-signed HTTPS server into an unencrypted HTTP server. The users were quite happy that their data was far more secure than it was under the old regime with the scary warnings, despite the fact that they were now being sent completely in the clear.
- sejje 12y agoWhat about users who aren't trained to look for the lock icon, but rather for the https? (I'm in that group)