FF Version Compatibility Info Needed about convergence HOT 2 CLOSED

Convergence is compatible with FF 4, 5, and 6. Sorry, it will never be compatible with older versions of FF (3.X).

Convergence is also self-hosted and not distributed through the AMO system, so you won't find it on addons.mozilla.org. Their review process is too slow for a rapidly changing project like this currently is, and the authors have had bad experiences with the AMO reviewers randomly killing addons without warning.

Perspectives is a reference implementation for the paper that was written at CMU. Key differences are:

1. Completeness. Perspectives does not work for any of the "background" content on a website (images, css, javascript, etc...) and thus still depends on the CA system. There are also many corner cases where Perspectives might not notice that the notary has rejected a certificate until after you've sent data.

2. Anonymity. Perspectives leaks your browsing history to the notaries.

3. Responsiveness. Perspectives does not have a mechanism to tell a Notary that you've experienced a mismatch, and requires that Notaries be constantly scanning sites on the internet to see if they've changed certificates. The window in between scans to a site will result in certificate errors for users, and the window period can be days long.

4. Extensibility. While the default Convergence notary currently uses network perspective, the communication protocol between client and notary is designed to allow for any number of notary strategies. While Perspectives is tied to network perspective, Convergence notaries can do any number of things (dnssec, ca certs, ssl observatory data, certificate pinning, google certificate catalog, etc...)

Convergence is obviously inspired by the Perspectives project, however, and the authors of both projects regularly correspond with each-other. For more information on Convergence, the best reference is still the presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA

from convergence.

Most beautiful response. If all Github issues were responded to in a similar fashion as you just did, we'd be in heaven by now!

In fact I just learned about Convergence (and several other tools) today, from that exact BH2011 video. Thanks again.

from convergence.