Carnegie-Mellon University has developed a
free add-on to the Mozilla Firefox 3.0 browser to boost
security for users.
The Perspectives add-on was developed at the university's School
of Computer Science and College of Engineering.
The software protects
Firefox users against potential "man-in-the-middle" wireless
attacks when users are surfing the web.
The Perspectives system also supports domain name website
certificates provided by the likes of VeriSign, Comodo and
Godaddy.
Perspectives uses "notaries" to query the desired site and check
authentication information. It also provides an extra measure of
security for sites that do not use certificate authorities, but
instead use less expensive "self-signed" certificates.
The Carnegie software can detect if a "certificated" site is
bogus or not, and warns users of its suspicions.
Perspectives also offers a defence against man-in-the-middle
attacks that might occur on wireless networks. Man-in-the-middle
attacks can see users seeking wireless access getting tricked into
communicating with an attacker's computer instead.