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Certs of WoSign and StartCOM no longer trusted by Mozilla browser and Apple

Certs of WoSign and StartCOM no longer trusted by Mozilla browser and Apple

04-10-2016 13:30:40

WoSign – one of the largest digital certificate provider in China, the owner of Israeli certificate authority (CA) StartCom – recently faced problems with Mozilla. It has all started after various security incidents, including issue of SSL/TLS certificates for primary GitHub domains to subdomain owner.

WoSign drew attention for the first time when Stephen Schrauger, a web developer for the University of Central Florida, managed to generate an SSL certificate for github.io by controlling just a subdomain schrauger.github.com. Schrauger passed validation for fun, and getting the certificate for the domain .io comments with lightness: "I did not add (certificate) www.github.com because I forgot."

Mozilla also accuses the company of buying StartCom, without telling anyone and without disclosing the change of ownership.

All this made Apple to kick WoSign CA Free SSL Certificate out of its trust program too.

Finally Mozilla decided new certificates from WoSign and StartCOM would no longer be trusted in their browser. However existing certificates will still be trusted. The CAs can reapply for browser inclusion in a year under certain conditions. This theoretically allows WoSign to create backdated certificates, however Mozilla announced that if they see any evidence of this they will immediately distrust all Wosign/StartCOM certificates.

One must admit - as Schrauger said -  domain validation isn't as simple as one may think, and WoSign isn't the first to have a problem. Hopefully situations like this will not, however, occurred.

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