[cap-talk] Firefox breaks the principle of identifiability

[Ben Laurie]

Jed Donnelley wrote:
> 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.

I agree it solves the problem of confusable URLs. I can't get very 
excited about that without a solution to the problem of how I 
realistically get hold of things to associate petnames with. Currently, 
if I want to go to Paypal's site, I type it in - petnames don't help me.

>> 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.

This would work. I don't believe it is practical.