full-disclosure - Bank of America SiteKeys ineffective?

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Date: Fri May 27 17:27:05 2005
From: mlande at bellsouth.net (Mary Landesman)
Subject: Bank of America SiteKeys ineffective?

>From my read of the news.com article and admittedly limited knowledge of
SiteKeys, it does not seem to me their intent is to make sure the user knows
they are at a legitimate BOA page. Rather, it seems to me the intent is to
ensure that if Betty Boop logs into her BOA account, that she's doing so
from a pre-authorized Betty Boop specified computer. And if she's not, then
the use of SiteKeys will make Betty Boop jump through several authentication
hoops before she is allowed access.

So if Betty Boop falls for a phish and compromises her account logon
details, the attacker would (presumably) have a more difficult time
exploiting those logon details.

Regards,
-- Mary

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike N" <niceman@....net>
To: <full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 7:32 AM
Subject: [Full-disclosure] Bank of America SiteKeys ineffective?

http://news.com.com/Bank+of+America+takes+on+cyberscams/2100-1029_3-5722035.html?tag=nefd.top

While I applaud Bank of America for being the first to take serious steps to
combat phishing, SiteKey only elimintes one class of attack - the simple web
site that masquerades as the real site.

  From what I can see in the article, SiteKey does not make use of digital
certificates to identify the user.  Therefore it does nothing to eliminte
the class of more sophisticated man-in-the-middle attacks already in use
which make use of DNS poisoning to take users to the wrong site.
  -   For this case the browser will cough up the cookie to the phisher
site, which they can pass on to the BofA site.  This will trigger the BofA
site to send back the image and phrase to the user via the Phisher site.
The user will enter the login and password; being none the wiser until it
fails or he is taken to the Phisher login action of choice.

  Bottom line: The only way be reasonably sure you are at your bank's site
is to go to a secure login page and examine the certificate to be verify
it's issued by a reputable certificate issuer to your bank in your bank's
locality.  If your bank uses a discount certificate issuer that you don't
recognize, don't trust them and get your bank to go with the real thing.
And better yet, bookmark the secure page to minimize chances of a typo
taking you to a secure type-alike site.

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