Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-kretschmann-kai-sighttp-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 07:34:05 -0400

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title		: Signed HTTP with static and dynamic content as a 
                          security enhancement against silent defacements
	Author(s)	: K. Kretschmann, M. Krech
	Filename	: draft-kretschmann-kai-sighttp-00.txt
	Pages		: 6
	Date		: 10-May-02
	
In case a webserver gets defaced a black hat might change vital
information with massive danger for the normal surfer.  If for example a
banking web portal site containing a link to the online banking login
screen gets changed pointing to the black hats identical mirror of the
login screen (as happend here some times already) he will get his hands
on real banking accounts.  The encryption via SSL of already defaced
data will be no solution at all. SSL is only a counterpart in this
scenario to ensure the connected web server is the right one and to dis-
able data sniffing on the wire.
The solution to this case might be signing all HTTP-accessable con-
tent including static and dynamic HTML pages.  This solution even keeps
an eye on dynamic portal content, as most starting pages now have
dynamic content on it, starting from the current time to brokerage news.
Best solution would never the less be to have the critical data within
static pages.
We can sign any URL based content because the signature doesn't get
into the content sent, but into the HTTP reply headers.  So we don't
modify any data. The HTTP reply doesn't need any change within the web-
server source code but can most times be configured by standard configu-
ration ways.
Signing not only HTML but possibly any critical data is needed for
example with a flash movie who display critical data like online broker-
age data.  This data might be forged by replacing a lying flash movie
with possibly bad consequences to stock rates.  One shouldn't underesti-
mate the criminal energy in these cases.

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