Recently, the Shmoo Group discovered that Firefox is vulnerable to precisely the exploit that i predicted in my 2002 paper—Ping

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The central point of my essay on the petname toolbar is that phishing is the result of name conflation.—Tyler

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So how, in this system, does the user come to trust Paypal (as opposed to someone pretending to be Paypal)?—Ben

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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.—Jed

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Indeed, but I am no closer to understanding how the user ever gets to a state where they can do anything useful.—Ben

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I gave some examples in my next message on this topic. Perhaps you could address them.—Jed

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I agree it solves the problem of confusable URLs.—Ben

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What don’t you believe is practical?—Jed

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Let’s say I start with actually visiting my bank, and getting the fingerprint of their cert. I then tediously type that into my machine.—Ben

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Forget the tedious typing. You give them your smart card (or something like) and they add a Petname binding to it.—Jed

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I’m sorry to be such a curmudgeon here, but-- this doesn’t sound like a solution I can get terribly excited about.—David

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No, you can both see and control the Petnames that are uploaded when you access the information on your card.—Jed

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Yes, that’s better, but still (I suspect) more dangerous than having users choose their own Petnames. See my response to Bill Frantz.—David

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The example chosen was somewhat stylised. In practice, we don’t get the introductions we desire, unless we pay for them (and even then ....). Nobody owes us that trust, no matter how much we think it would solve our security problems if they did.—Ian

While I think of it, it is well worth the effort to look at the two graphics I snaffled in today’s blog entry:

<financialcryptography.com>—Ian