[cap-talk] Firefox breaks the principle of identifiability

[Jed Donnelley]

At 08:29 PM 2/7/2005, Ben Laurie wrote:
>Jed at Webstart wrote:
>>,,,
>>If I'm understanding the discussion so far, I think the answer is that
>>the issue of trust is separate from the issue of identity...
>
>What do you mean "of course"? By what mechanism did the user identify the 
>"real" Paypal? How do you know they've ever even come across Paypal before?
>
>>  Whatever identity
>>the user set up for this someone, it would be different from "Paypal".
>>This seems to make "trying to pretend" inherently difficult.  What
>>would induce a user to use a Petname like Paypa1 that could
>>be easily confused with Paypal?
>
>A website that says "this is the Paypal website" all over it, perhaps?

That wouldn't induce me (at least) to use a name like Paypa1 (note
the digit one = 1 vs. the letter "l").  Doing so could only result in
confusion.  It might induce me to establish a trust relationship
with whatever identity I choose to give the site (e.g. NewPaypal
or perhaps it's the first "Paypal" that I've assigned an identity for
and I choose "Paypal" as the Petname for this site.  However,
assigning any trust to such a site based on it's saying "this is
the Paypal website" would be foolish.

>>How much the user chooses to trust either the Paypal identity/Petname
>>or this other non-Paypal identity/Petname is of course up to the
>>user with input from others such as friends, authorities, etc.
>>I hope I'm close to the base issue.
>
>Indeed, but I am no closer to understanding how the user ever gets to a 
>state where they can do anything useful.

I gave some examples in my next message on this topic.  Perhaps you could 
address them.
For example, I gave the example where someone I trust could say, "If you 
visit the site, view
it's SSL certificate and find that it's MD5 Fingerprint is 
A9:04:4D:...:E2:31:9A  then I can trust
that it's "Paypal" the organization that you can place some trust in."

Does that answer your question?  If you are asking the deeper question of 
how one
bootstraps trust relationships to begin with (e.g. consider communicating with
extraterrestrials with whom we can have no physical contact) then we could go
there, but I think we are getting pretty far afield from "Firefox breaks 
the principle
of identifiability" - which I do believe Petnames solves.

>Try this for a thought experiment. I have a brand new laptop. I have no 
>petnames for anything, obviously. What do I do now? Describe the process 
>by which I end up with a petname for Paypal that actually links to the 
>real Paypal.

Please let me know if the mechanism above suffices.  E.g. suppose the
'someone I trust' is my bank through personal physical exchange.