Vulnerabilities


Moxie Marlinspike on TACK, Convergence and Trust Agility

Dennis Fisher talks with Moxie Marlinspike about his new IETF proposal, TACK, which lays out a way for sites to assert the authenticity of their public keys. They also discuss the Convergence system for replacing the CA infrastructure and the ways in which browser vendors can help enable better trust agility for users.


Browsers are a really nice target for attackers of all stripes and skill levels. But, unless you’re a savant or have just landed here from the future, you may want to take a pass on going after Google Chrome, judging by the insane level of effort and skill that an anonymous security researcher had to deploy in order to compromise Chrome during the company’s Pwnium contest in March.

Since the beginning of recorded time, security researchers, software vendors and hackers have been issuing security advisories in all kinds of nutty formats. Some feature excellent ASCII art, some have clever inside jokes and some come from Microsoft. Now, there’s a effort underway, called the Common Vulnerability Reporting Framework, to standardize the way that vulnerabilities are reported so that they’re in a common, machine-readable format.