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StartCom customers received word that the company would close down as a certification authority due to the protective action browser manufacturers took against it, over a year ago. The news of the company closing down had been published November 16th on their website, but went unnoticed until now.
StartCom has played a critical role as a Certification Authority in data security and electronic commerce by providing an independent "trusted third party" guarantee all these years.
Around a year ago the majority of the browser makers decided to distrust StartCom, remove the StartCom root certificates from their root stores and not accept newly end entity certificates issued by StartCom.
Despite the efforts made during this time by StartCom, up to now, there has not been any clear indication from the browsers that StartCom would be able to regain the trust. Therefore, the owners of StartCom have decided to terminate StartCom as a Certification Authority (CA).
From January 1st, 2018, StartCom will not issue any new end entity certificate and will only provide validation services through its OCSP and CRL services for two years from January 1st, 2018. Starting 2020, all remaining valid certificates will be revoked.
StartCom wants to thank all of our customers and partners during these years for their support.
Disclaimer: Early on, SoylentNews used StartCom certs.
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday December 07 2017, @03:52PM (5 children)
Did we learn nothing from Honest Achmed? (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959 still bloody funny all these years later.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @03:59PM
What about those CAs that have fucked up in the past, and still enjoy being built in, like Commodo?
Makes me wonder how much cash does flow to the browser oligarchs to make amends.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @05:18PM (2 children)
What browser do you use? I'd certainly expect that CAs I disabled remain disabled, but I admittedly never checked.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 07 2017, @09:41PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @10:29PM
Yes, but you didn't read the small print. It said "Delete or distrust, for built-in tokens all trust is removed which is basically the same thing as removal."
You can verify this with the Edit trust... button.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 07 2017, @07:46PM
Check out that buzzkill from 3 years ago.
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