[2044] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: Verisign and Certificates
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nikos Drakos)
Fri May 10 10:12:07 1996
From: nikos@mpn.com (Nikos Drakos)
Date: Fri, 10 May 1996 13:03:07 +0100
To: Mike.Bremford@mail.bl.uk
Cc: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
> Aha! This sounds more like it - a european company issuing certificates.
Step in the right direction but not quite. They are not recognised as a
Certification Authority by any browser so end users will feel no more confident
in Eurosign than if you became your own certification authority! Netscape
will give out warnings which may scare some users. We created
and issued our own key for an apache server while waiting for Verisign
to renew our Netsite commerce server certificate so it's not that hard
to do! The important thing is to get the certificate from a *trusted*
third party.
Another problem with Eurosign (or with issuing your own key) is that
the most popular browsers (pre Netscape 2.0) will not be able use
these certificates at all.
Also I found it puzzling that the message about Eurosign which
gave the impression (at least to me) that it came from a happy
Eurosign customer seems to have the same email address as Eurosign!
> Can you possibly post a URL or e-mail for this "EuroSign"?
www.eurosign.com
> Cheers... Mike
Cheers,
Nikos.
--
Nikos Drakos
MatriX Publishing Network nikos@mpn.net
32/34 Broadwick Street Tel: +44-171 316 9291
London Fax: +44-171 437 9951
W1A 2HG http://www.mpn.net/
> -------
>
> Finally having waited for Verisign to send back a certificate for a while we
> have given up waiting. Last time we had our certificate renewed they failed
> to send out the renewal in time, I had to chase them on the phone.
>
> Luckily versions 2.0 of Netscape and later do allow other CAs' certs if in a
> relatively patchy manner. As our business had come to a halt (from the
> SSL perspective) I have now installed a EuroSign Certificate.
>
> People expressed an interest in finding out what happened. That is what
> happened. It is a bit of a nuisance, but I do not want to have this problem
> every six months.
>
>
>
>
>
