Re: What *are* they smoking?

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb () research att com>]

It's bad enough now; it could be even worse.  They could respond on 
port 443, too, with a legitimate-seeming certificate -- they're 
*Verisign*, the leading certficate authority.

In the security world, we call this a man- (or monkey-)in-the-middle
attack, for which the standard defense is crypto.  But that doesn't 
work well when your trusted third party is part of the threat model...


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb