Perspectives ext updated to 3.0.2
Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 12:10 am
Version 3 of the Perspectives extension for Firefox is finally out of beta and released as version 3.0.2. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/firefox.html
There might be other improvements, but most noticeable is more compact use of the status bar. Version 2 put "Perspectives" in the status bar, which took up way more space than necessary. That's been replaced with just an icon.The extension provides two primary benefits:
1. If you connect to a website with an untrusted (e.g.,self-signed certificate)*, Firefox will give you a very nasty security error and force you to manually install an exception. Perspectives can detect whether a self-signed certificate is valid, and automatically overrides the annoying security error page if it is safe to do so.
2. It is possible that an attacker may trick one of the many Certificate Authorities trusted by Firefox into incorrectly issuing a certificate for a trusted website. Perspectives can also detect this attack and will warn you if things look suspicious.
* The same is true for HTTPS sites with certificates that contain mismatched domain names (e.g., http://www.gmail.com uses a certificate for mail.google.com) or certificates that are expired.