Thousands of SSL Certs Issued To Unqualified Names

Trailrunner7 writes "The recent attack on Comodo and several of its associated registration authorities has spurred quite a bit of re-examination of the way that the Web's certificate authority infrastructure works--or doesn't. One interesting result of this work is that the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have discovered that there are more than 37,000 legitimate certificates issued by CAs for unqualified names such as 'localhost,' or 'Exchange,' a practice that could simplify some forms of man-in-the-middle attacks. 'Although signing "localhost" is humorous, CAs create real risk when they sign other unqualified names. What if an attacker were able to receive a CA-signed certificate for names like "mail" or "webmail?"' Such an attacker would be able to perfectly forge the identity of your organization's webmail server in a "man-in-the-middle" attack!'"

I have a solution!!!!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Obviously, the notion that CAs are fundamentally broken, dubiously competent, and somewhat parasitic is bad for business and therefore can be rejected out of hand.

Therefore, I propose the following: All browsers shall be required to stop trusting those inexpensive standard SSL certs, as well as certs issued by budget CAs. 'Extended Validation' certs will now be baseline, with prices remaining unchanged, and two new levels of verification will be added:

'Extended Validation: Pinky Swear!'(indicated by a green background with two interlocking pinky fingers) will have the same standards as 'EV'; but with the additional promise that we had the work experience kid, or a script, whichever is cheaper, check that the certificate request wasn't made from a hotmail account.

'Double-Secret Extended Validation'(icon TBA, pending negotiations with film rightsholders) is so secure that we can't even tell you the process by which we verify applications; but it is super secure.

This should solve all CA related trust issues.