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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the certified-or-certifiable? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

After being pinged by Mozilla for issuing backdated SHA-1 certificates, Chinese certificate authority WoSign's owner has put the cleaners through the management of WoSign and StartCom.

Mozilla put WoSign and StartCom on notice at the end of September.

As part of its response, the company has posted around 200,000 certificates with the Google transparency log server as well as on its own CT log server, covering everything issued in 2015 and 2016, with a promise to expand that to "all certificates past and present".

In this discussion thread, Bugzilla lead developer Gervase Markham explains that people from WoSign's majority shareholder Qihoo 360 and StartCom met with Mozilla representatives last Tuesday in London.

WoSign's full response is here (PDF). In it, as summarised in the mailing list discussion by StartCom founder Eddy Nigg, the company promises to:

Qihoo 360 is taking the issue of backdated SHA-1 certs, in January 2016, as the most serious violation, and the reason for the executive re-organisation.

The incident report states: "Wosign is in process of making legal and personnel changes in both WoSign and StartCom to ensure that both WoSign and StartCom have leadership that understand and follow the standards of running a CA".

The incident report lists more than 60 backdated certificates, including the one issued to Australian-headquartered payments processor Tyro (The Register has previously contacted Tyro for comment, but received no response).


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @11:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @11:07AM (#412891)

    Microsoft's approach is even more broken: https://www.proper.com/root-cert-problem/ [proper.com]

    Basically CA certificates that are signed by Microsoft or another suitable CA in your trusted store will get automatically added to your cert store and trusted.

    With this approach, unknown/future certificates that you might not want to trust, could still get added and trusted automatically. It's worse than Pokemon - you can't catch them all. On Windows Chrome uses Microsoft's Cert infra so it's vulnerable to this problem too.

    At least with Firefox, you only need to do this whack-a-mole when Mozilla adds certs to the Firefox's store.