Yes, that is exactly right, and it's also why certs are short-lived (hours). When certs are renewed, the site the user plans on logging into is not revealed to the Identity Provider.
By my understanding, yes and yes. The third-party service caches the public key (with timestamp) and the browser caches the signed certificate (with timestamp). The timestamp gives the credentials a relatively short TTL to prevent a stolen cert from being used indefinitely.
Re:Persona is distributed. Today.
by marcioaguiar on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @09:24PM
(#5447192)
not different from someone stealing your cookies.
Cookies can be invalidated. Signatures, not so much.
I'm guessing there's some sort of timestamp there, to prevent someone from just stealing the cert and logging in to whatever they want as that user.