Plug-in opens door for self-signed SSL certs in Firefox 3

An online posting of an article in INFORMATION SECURITY MAGAZINE appeared Friday about the release of a software plugin developed by CMU Professors Adrian Perrig and Dave Anderson along with Ph.D. student Dan Wendlandt. The plugin, as part of a system called Perspectives, was designed to relieve some of the anxiety surrounding Mozilla Corp's decision to not display sites with either self-signed or expired SSL digital certificates in Firefox 3.

The Perspectives system works from a series of servers that monitor website connections recording public encryption keys over time. If the servers can authenticate that the same key has been returned for a requested site for a predetermined period of time, Perspectives will override Firefox 3's default block on the site and allow the user to proceed.

See SearchSecurity.com for details.