There's also the point https://stripe.ian.sh/ made: it's not just about registering the same name in a different state. People don't know in what state your (parent company) headquarters are so they would need to dig deep into the organisational structure to find out if the EV cert they're presented with isn't from a company with the same name in another state. Want to add more years of registration? Just buy an old, probably no longer used letterbox company and change the legal name. Whois info can be set to anything you want for most domain registrars as well. People will still need to find out if all the data matches.
There's also this demonstration of how EV can actually be used to help phishing by using the "green address bar" and the hilariously stupid Apple address bar design: https://www.typewritten.net/writer/ev-phishing/
I believe there is value in EV certificates if you can rely on the identity verification that they come with. Sadly, most providers of EV certificates seem to view them as a way to make more money, not as a tool to bring trust to the web.
An EV-like system will probably be reinvented in the future, giving us a fresh start on identify verification on the web without the crappy practises and standards that plague the EV system today.
Lastly, for such a system to work, all (big) companies need EV certificates. Even before browsers started cutting back on EV UI, nobody knew what site does or doesn't have EV. Some subdomains used different certificates, some didn't have certificates at all. How do you know if a (sub)domain is supposed to have an EV certificate? Will you tell people to just not log into Facebook anymore because they don't have an EV at their login page?
EV doesn't work because it's the wrong way around. For security indicators to work, you need to warn for danger instead of turning off the "everything is okay" light. The OV/EV system has been designed around the latter idea and as long as EV/OV isn't freely available all over the world, nobody's going to mark DV certificates as "insecure".
The identity problem is always fun. I mean i don't care who someone is in real life, i only wanna know whether i have the site by the same individual who made something else.
That can be easily and automatically verified (see keybase) and might be more than enough for a lot of things where there are only normal people involved.
It might also be helpful of a given company is more commonly known behind another online entity. Like for example if pewdiepie had a company which he uses for what he does, the link to his yt would be a much greater indicator of validity than some random company name or even his own real name (which not everyone may know).
For pure DVs i think they should be able to issue them themselves. I mean the only thing those prove is domain control and with dnssec+tlsa there's a great way that domain owners can prove that they are in control of the domain and aurhorize a cert, also this lowers the number of trust paths significantly as there is only one possibly trust path over the TLD, and not like 150 CAs from who knows where. Also both the domain owners and the users have less entities they have to trust, as the TLD managers have to be trusted anyway as they ultimately have the full control of their domains,and thereby could make a DV cert themselves over the CAs anyway.
Research suggests they don't do a very good job at that.
They’re actively making them worse, actually. I can’t even view the details of the certificate chain in Chrome on iOS. I used to be able to save them from the browser on a computer, and now I can’t do that, either.
Everybody rails on how useless EVs are, yet it seems like no browsers have spent any time over the past years even trying to improve the UX related to certs. I mean, sure they’ve changed the color and removed the ambiguous company name and country. Which makes you ask why did they ever display country in situations where that isn’t the jurisdiction that issues business licenses, such as in the US?
I mean, click on the lock and through N buttons, then expand various sections and read through dotted identifiers that only ASN.1 experts recognize (seriously, who though it would be a good idea to use OIDs for known fields in the UI?), and then maybe you’ll understand who the certificate is issued to.
At least in the US, when obtaining and EV cert you need the jurisdiction (state), business registration number, they call the business phone number. They basically do some research - usually you need a DUNs number, publicly listed phone number, etc. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a button that when you click it you see a user-friendly window showing the information about the company for OV/EV? I mean, sure, you can register Stripe in a different state - how about providing some statistics like what year the company was formed (usually only file with business registration), a link to the company registration details on the jurisdiction website, the top level domain Whois info, etc? If you wanted to get fancy you could provide a link to the user’s search engine with the company name as the search terms.
Instead it seems like we have a bunch of cryptographers (or maybe just infosec people) obsessed about 1. The money companies are charging for EV certs 2. that it is possible for mistakes to happen. This instead of improving how we present information about a company.
So since there isn’t a perfect, foolproof identity verification system for companies online, now every user online needs to do their own reconnaissance to make sure this is really the website they should be at.