e-mudhra digital certificate

[appaji]

I just applied for an individual digital signature certificate at e-Mudhra CA. They have an inaugural offer price of Rs. 248 for a class 3 individual certificate with a validity of two years. The price is good! There is physical presence verification with official documentation at a registration authority (RA) of e-Mudhra, but that should be

Comments

Site is somewhat off-putting

[ext_178343]

Following your post, I headed over to the e-mudhra.com site. I was
put off by the following aspects:

- A site that demands IE 6.0 or Netscape 4 is fine if it is casual
browsing. For e-commerce sites, not so! Especially, since these
browsers are mentioned in their terms of service. This sounds too
much like "If the site borks during your transaction and you are
using Firefox then we are not to blame."

- A very Javascript oriented site. Using w3m I needed to look at the
page source just to navigate! I can't/won't voluntarily subject myself
to this when there are alternatives.

- The protocol they use for certificate delivery (we send you a
one-time web access and if you download it, you pay for it) puts
the onus of proof of non-delivery on the recipient. That is not a
proper security protocol. Since strong crypto is available as part
of the whole process they should implement a _real_ protocol.

- The info string for the site indicates that they run IIS which
more or less implies a MicroSoft based server. Disappointing, no?!

Kapil.

Re: Site is somewhat off-putting

[appaji]

You are right. The site doesn't work with Mozilla Firefox (even on Windows) and iceweasel (when it comes to payment). You could workaround using the user-agent switcher though. I noticed that a lot of sites don't guarantee complete cross browser compatibility. I spoke to the 3i folks about this and they said that they are working towards having this fixed.

So you use w3m? [plug] You should also give elinks a shot :) [/plug]

The download is not one time (one is allowed to download for upto 15 days) and you can choose to have it snail-mailed with the auth token in email. I'll report on this delivery aspect again later.

Re: Site is somewhat off-putting

[appaji]

Oh, as for running IIS, your tone indicates that you probably don't like the fact that it is a Microsoft product. FWIW, I am not against _commercial_ software (no matter which company it comes from, even though I would like it if a vendor was running free software). As long as the software adheres to the required standards, I am OK. In this particular case though, I know that IIS does implement parts of HTTP poorly.