(For more information on EV certificates and Web browsers, see Rich Mogull’s “ Are Safari’s New Anti-Phishing Features Useful?,”. Firefox 3, Safari 3.2, Opera 9.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Google Chrome are among the browsers that support EV. In a Web browser, a site that uses an EV certificate typically shows extra information in the location bar, often the name of the company in white on a green background. It makes perfect sense that banks would opt for EV certificates to avoid any potential of misdirection or fraud. )Ī regular SSL/TLS certificate can cost $30 to $500 an EV certificate adds a few hundred dollars on top of that. See “ Apple Fails to Patch Critical Exploited DNS Flaw,”. Dan Kaminsky’s discovery of a flaw in DNS that made it possible for an attacker to provide an alternate IP address for a given domain name lookup – like – also showed how vulnerable SSL/TLS certificates were when DNS was vulnerable. (Even with EV validation, SSL/TLS isn’t a perfect way to ensure security. (Click or double click the lock icon in most Web browsers to display the certificate data, which shows the registrant’s name and a few other pieces of non-technical data.)ĮV certificates require that the issuing CA perform much more extensive confirmation of the requesting person and organization, checking the ownership of the domain name for which the certificate is requested, and other factors. If users check that certificate, they see the expected company name even if the domain is unfamiliar. That can allow criminals to obtain certificates that fraudulently associate a company name with another domain. When a CA issues a normal certificate, they perform very little validation that the person asking for the certificate is the correct entity. EV certificates are intended to solve a problem of identity and trust. )īECU started using an Extended Validation (EV) certificate from VeriSign right when I started having problems. (For more intimate details, read Chris Pepper’s “ Securing Communications with SSL/TLS: A High-Level Overview,”. If so, the encrypted connection proceeds if it fails, you’re warned. Thus, when your browser requests the first page from a secure Web site, it first receives the site’s certificate and validates it by checking that the signature of the CA is valid. The CA’s signature can be checked against signatures that are preloaded into operating systems and browsers to help users confirm they are really connected to the proper site. SSL/TLS connections use digital certificates designed to enable the exchange of a unique session encryption key that can’t be snooped upon.Ī Web site obtains a certificate from a certificate authority (CA), such as VeriSign, and that authority uses a cryptographic process to sign the certificate. BECU, like all financial institutions, uses SSL/TLS to protect connections between a Web browser or Quicken and its Web site. There’s a thread at the Quicken Community site about this BECU issue (scroll to the bottom for current messages).ĭigital Certificates - Here’s the deal. Quicken 2007 for Mac (the current release) and earlier versions lack support for a newer, ostensibly more rigorous method of ensuring that a secured Web site is really the site it claims to be. The answer was surprising, and it apparently took BECU some research, too. But the problem persisted, and I sent email to the bank to find out why. I assumed something had broken, staff was away, and gave up. Last week, in the middle of the first wave of snow that hit Seattle, I tried to download banking transactions from my credit union, BECU (once dedicated to Boeing employees), using Quicken 2006 for Mac and received an odd error. #1624: Important OS security updates, rescuing QuickTake 150 photos, AirTag alerts while traveling.
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