You're not interested in the risk of or protection against provided by SSL encryption for a simple and probably relatively common passive attack? Because those people are lazy or dumb, we can write them off entirely and say SSL provides no security if there's a potential CA related exploit? I get that it's not as interesting a situation to think about, but I think that logically you can prove that SSL provides an increased security over http to the end user, even if some certs could be compromised.
" (2) You have to be able to generate the collision within a short window of time to get the resulting product signed properly by the CA, so you need the new academic result (and the PS3s).
(1) The attack is extremely difficult to pull off.
(2) Critical details required to carry it out --- an academic breakthrough in MD5 collision-finding --- were actually withheld, meaning that no "zero-day" occurred. (3) The "fix" for this attack is for RapidSSL to randomize serials and stop using MD5, both of which will happen; if you believe certificates from before today are vulnerable, that's an even stronger argument for publishing. "
So you might be tricked into setting up encrypted communication to one of the (small) N groups that have the knowledge/budget to do a Sotirov attack, but at least you still won't have identity details hijacked by (large) M others, because even broken cert-checking protects against them.
We're not talking about the scenario where a very smart attacker is targeting me with this security hole. We're talking about the impact of not revoking the certificates in question. At which point there is a very very small possibility that I will be targeted by an active attacker with the know-how to exploit this issue. The rest of the time SSL will continue to work as designed and will protect me from wifi snoopers and suspect routers.
There absolutely are passive attackers. There are people running open wifi points that log http form submissions with a "password" field, and then try the same username/password on a few major sites (ebay, amazon, etrade, gmail, BoA, etc...) automatically (working on the assumption that people use the same login/password on the many non-ssl authed non-important sites as they do for their important accounts). Successful login data is marked. I have met people running these. It costs nothing, is fully automated, and has very little risk.
They may not be "serious attackers", but the likelihood of one of them getting your mom's eTrade info is much higher than an active attacker targeting your mom.