Re: Security team successfully cracks SSL using 200 PS3's and MD5

[Joe Abley <jabley () hopcount ca>]

On 2 Jan 2009, at 12:33, Joe Greco wrote:

> We cannot continue to justify security failure on the basis that a
> significant percentage of the clients don't support it, or are  
> broken in
> their support.  That's an argument for fixing the clients.

At a more basic level, though, isn't failure guaranteed for these kind  
of clients (web browsers) so long as users are conditioned to click OK/ 
Continue for every SSL certificate failure that is reported to them?

If I was attempting a large-scale man-in-the-middle attack, perhaps  
I'd be happier to do no work and intercept 5% of sessions (those who  
click OK on a certificate that is clearly bogus) than I would to do an  
enormous amount of work and intercept 100% (those who would see no  
warnings). And surely 5% is a massive under-estimate.


Joe