> What really annoys me is when some fool thinks that getting a
> certificate made out to
www.example.com is fine when they try to use it
> with
mail.example.com, so I always see completely avoidable warnings.
> If they'd had the sense to had a wild-card type of certificate made out
> to just
example.com, or had the certificate cover more than one
> sub-domain, or created more than one certificate, things would just
> work.
The reason they don't get a wildcard cert or a CA cert is that CA's that
have certs installed with the browsers charge more. They'd rather you'd
pay them to sign your certificates rather than allow you to easily be
your own CA for essentially the same cost of a single cert. The security
benefit of doing that way is negligible. It's all about money.
What Firefox (and other browsers) should be doing is treating https with a self
signed cert the same as http.
Even nicer would be to automatically check with all of the signing
authorities that the browser currently trusts as to whether they have
issued a certificate for this name or not. If any of them have, the
self-signed copy is likely to be a fraud of some sort. Otherwise it is
probably just a site that only wants encryption for the data stream - or
perhaps just the authentication, but http(s) doesn't provide a handy way
to separate the steps.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com