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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of an EV cert was to provide the user with trust that the company running the site is a legitimate business. That is different from the purpose of TLS in general, which is simply to secure traffic over the wire. That's why they are different products.

The use case for EV is hard, and CAs did not always deliver on the goal. But instead of working on that hard problem of trust on first visit, most security professionals have decided to ignore that problem and pretend that all certs have ever needed to do is secure the wire. Of course EV certs look silly under that line of thinking, but that doesn't mean it's right or complete.

The industry has basically given up on the idea that there is some way to establish trust on first visit. Which is nuts, because we take it for granted in real life that we can just walk into a brick and mortar store and conduct business without getting mugged.

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most security professionals have decided to ignore that problem and pretend that all certs have ever needed to do is secure the wire

If you want to blame someone, blame the original designers of the current system, who decided certificates had to be a one-size-fits-all solution for both encryption and identity. Also, blame the years and years and years during which people on sites like HN condescendingly insisted that identity was the important part of TLS/SSL, and who more or less said you'd be better off unencrypted than encrypted without ultra-mega-hyper-octuple-verified identity.

In real life it's difficult and expensive for me to rent a brick-and-mortar storefront, cover it with the branding and logos of a trusted company, stock it with real-looking products and employees in uniforms, etc. On the web, it takes five minutes and costs little or no money to produce a good-enough imitation of a trusted company's site. Any attempt to analogize between them will fail because of how much lower the barrier is online. Any attempt to say that it's easy in real life, so it ought to be easy online is based on missing this fundamental fact.

Also, we live in an age where it's profitable to cold-call people on the phone and say "I'm the tax authority and you owe money, buy $500 worth of iTunes gift cards and send them to this address", and where the majority of calls that come to my phone use spoofed caller ID to try to scam me.

"Trust on first visit" is really a monstrously hard problem, and I think you're underestimating that.

I'm not underestimating how hard the problem is, I'm complaining that people are taking the difficulty as an excuse to pretend it does not exist, or to treat it as unsolvable.

I'm not saying it's easy in real life, I'm saying it's largely solved in real life. There is a big difference between those two ideas.

The difficulty was part of how it was solved. In addition to the physical difficulty of setting up a store, businesses have to be registered and licensed by state and local authorities. The purpose of the EV cert (and the OV cert, really) was to tie web trust back to that same regulatory infrastructure. If you have a problem with a site using an EV cert, you can look up the company info in the cert and contact their local authorities.

The purpose of the EV cert (and the OV cert, really) was to tie web trust back to that same regulatory infrastructure.

Except the only way to get what you want using EV is to force literally every site on the internet to go through the EV cert process. Otherwise, somebody's going to go get a "less verified" cert, set up an impostor site and phish people.

Is that really the world you want? Is that the price you're willing to pay to get it?

> Except the only way to get what you want using EV is to force literally every site on the internet to go through the EV cert process.

No it's not. There are a lot of ways to physically sell things without setting up a retail establishment. You can drag a box out onto the sidewalk and sell sunglasses to people; you can host a yard sale, you can set up at a flea market, you use a classified ad or Craigslist, you can sell through MLM, etc. Customers will calibrate their level of trust based on the experience you provide.

Operating a physical retail store (or a bank branch, or a restaurant, etc) carries with it an implicit promise of trust to the customer, and it's a promise that is backed by social and legal conventions.

So there's a range of experiences and implied trust in physical life, and it's fine if there is a range online. Site operators could choose the level of trust they're willing to invest in providing.

> Otherwise, somebody's going to go get a "less verified" cert, set up an impostor site and phish people.

That's only true if browsers make less verified certs look the same as more verified certs, which is what they are doing. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now every site looks like a guy with a box on the sidewalk.

That's only true if browsers make less verified certs look the same as more verified certs

Given that decades of user research overwhelmingly indicates that the average web user does not understand the components of the browser URL bar, and in many cases those users are completely unaware there even is useful information there, I'm going to bow out of this, because you're now into territory where you need to forcibly educate every single person on earth to understand the URL bar.

(and you're "only" now requiring that every single person who will ever do business of any sort must pay up for an EV cert, but that's actually less of a problem than trying to force people to understand what an EV cert is and how to tell if a site has one)

Why are we constrained to the URL bar?

I think people have just developed a weird blindness about the possibilities of user interface in browsers. There's no reason browsers could not have created all sorts of interesting user experiences with the validated business information in EV and OV certs.

If you don't have identity as part of the process, the result doesn't do anything. TOFU is broken completely, there are studies showing SSH key rotations in a computer science department triggered no attempts to verify the key change at all.

And the whole point of encryption is you think there's a MITM, so if you are using a scheme that doesn't stop MITM, why bother encrypt at all? Just bank the simplicity and performance savings and don't do it.

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