Hacker News Reader

Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why browsers didn't show the SSL Common Name or other agreed upon identifier, in place of a little lock. Why do I have to click 4 times in Firefox Linux Desktop, just to see info on the cert?

So this is perhaps why there is no EV or OV differentiation. Who cares? Of what use is an EV cert, if no one even checks the name. Or further, knows if the bank (for example) uses that CA?

I think in such a context, 'green' and 'no-green' is just non-helpful to validate anything. Sadly, 1 person out of 1000? actually care about encryption, or even know what SSL is. Maybe only 1 out of 10000 know about EV.

Sometimes I just become sad, when I think of the lack of general knowledge about fairly important things.

View on HN

For PKIX (and thus in your web browser) leaf certificates the X.509 Common Name is only permitted to be textually equivalent to one of the SANs (Subject Alternative Names, the Internet's way to write a name for a machine) in the certificate. So that's either a dnsName or an ipAddress. This is grandfathered in because it's how Netscape worked last century before PKIX was standardised and thus before SANs existed to do this properly.

So it would be prohibited to issue leaf certificates with a CN that's a human meaningful name like "Google" or "Hacker News" because that violates PKIX.

It doesn't matter anyway, the only enforcement that really matters for HTTPS is the mechanical enforcement by the user agent, because there are way too many HTTPS transactions for the human to realistically assess the certificate shown for each transaction and decide if it's OK.

Agreed, I don't think we'll ever see this because most people don't care. I'd guess greater than 95% of people, really 99% of people, couldn't tell you the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.

It just should work for them, and the browser should enforce it. I think the tech world is biased to think consumers are more technically inclined due to the people they are around. I do not work in computer tech. No-one I work with, all of whom have some form of an engineering degree unrelated to computers, could tell you the difference or care less.

How would you propose verifying that agreed upon identifier?

Validating human-readable names, be that of individuals or corporations, would be opening a can of worms. Domain validation is already decidedly non-trivial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com