Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates are a new offering by trusted third parties like VeriSign and are only issued to companies after a standardized vetting process. When an EV enabled browser like Internet Explorer 7 connects to a server that presents an EV certificate, the address bar is highlighted green and a certificate status bar containing the company name and the identifying company is shown. This visual feedback should give the user the assurance to be connected to a valid secure site of the named company.
While the process to get an EV certificate ensures that only valid companies will get an EV certificate, the technical implementation of EV support in IE7 allows enabling any root certificate and even self created root certificates to issue EV certificates. The EV status (the green bar) shown in IE7 does therefore currently not guarantee that the standardized vetting process before issuing an EV certificate was actually followed.