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Google Drops the Boom on WoSign, StartCom Certs for Good

Accepted submission by Fnord666 at 2017-07-23 21:13:59
Security

Last August, after being alerted by GitHub's security team that the certificate authority WoSign had errantly issued a certificate for a GitHub domain to someone other than GitHub [schrauger.com], Google began an investigation in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and a group of security professionals into the company's certificate issuance practices. The investigation uncovered a pattern of bad practices at WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom dating back to the spring of 2015 [mozilla.org]. As a result, Google moved last October to begin distrusting new certificates issued by the two companies [googleblog.com], stating "Google has determined that two CAs, WoSign and StartCom, have not maintained the high standards expected of CAs and will no longer be trusted by Google Chrome."

WoSign [wosign.com] (based in Shenzen, China) and StartCom [startcomca.com] (based in Eliat, Israel) are among the few low-cost certificate providers who've offered wildcard certificates. StartCom's StartSSL offers free Class 1 certificates, and $60-per-year wildcard certificates—allowing the use of a single certificate on multiple subdomains with a single confirmation. This made the service wildly popular. But bugs in WoSign's software allowed a number of misregistrations of certificates. One bug allowed someone with control of a subdomain to claim control of the whole root domain for certificates. The investigation also found that WoSign was backdating the SSL certificates it issued [mozilla.org] to get around the deadline set for certificate authorities to stop issuing SHA-1 SSL certificates by January 1, 2016. WoSign continued to issue the less secure SHA-1 SSL certificates [arstechnica.com] well into 2016.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/google-drops-the-boom-on-wosign-startcom-certs-for-good/ [arstechnica.com]


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