Wandering Thoughts archives

2010-02-02

What charging credit cards doesn't prove

Every so often, commonly in the context of SSL certificates, someone puts forward the theory that charging money for things makes the customers somehow more identifiable and reliable than giving it to people for free (with the same other authentication of customers). After all, so the theory goes, when you give people something just because they have a particular email address, that's not much, but when you've charged their credit card, you have a lot more confidence in their real identity.

This is wrong. To explain why it is wrong, let's talk specifically about SSL certificates.

The basic model of 'verifying' SSL certificates is that in order to get a certificate for a domain, you have to prove that you (theoretically) have power over that domain; you have one of a certain number of email addresses at that domain, you can put things on its web server, or something of the like. Most SSL certificate authorities also charge money on top of this; you submit credit card information along with your Certificate Signing Request, they charge your card, and if the charge goes through you get your signed certificate in email. By collecting money from you, they've gotten a stronger verification than before.

Except that they haven't, because I snuck a fast one into this description: charging a credit card is not the same as actually collecting money from it. No SSL CA waits on giving you your certificate until they actually have received your money from the credit card company; the delays involved in that would drive most customers away. Instead they issue SSL certificates very close to on the spot, which means that SSL CAs are not verifying that you can pay them money, they are verifying that they can charge a credit card. And there are a lot of ways to get a credit card number that can have some amount of money charged to it and not have that reversed, rejected, or detected as fraudulent for (say) six hours, if not days.

(Oh, sure, once the charge blows up the SSL CA will try to revoke the SSL certificate. Good luck with that.)

(This is kind of a reaction to this, because I think this misapprehension is a general one.)

tech/ChargingNoProof written at 01:39:20; Add Comment


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