You Are Who You Appear to Be
Richard M. Roberts, Yaelle Goldschlag, Rachel Walter, Taejoong Chung, Alan Mislove, Dave Levin · 2019
The public key infrastructure (PKI) provides the fundamental property of authentication: the means by which users can know with whom they are communicating online. The PKI ensures end-to-end authenticity insofar as it verifies a chain of certificates, but the true final step in end-to-end authentication comes when the user verifies that the website is what they expect. To this end, users are expected to evaluate domain names, but various "domain impersonation" attacks threaten their ability to do so. Indeed, if a user could be easily tricked into believing that amazon.com-offers.com is actually amazon.com, then, coupled with security indicators like a lock icon, users could believe that they have a secure connection to Amazon.