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Verisign Certificate Expiration Causes Multiple Problems
We had to do a little sleuthing today. Many readers wrote in with problems that turned out to be related. A certificate which Verisign used for signing SSL certificates has expired. When applications which depend on that certificate try to make an SSL connection, they fail and try to access crl.verisign.com, the certificate revocation list server. This has effectively DOS'ed that site, and Verisign has now updated the DNS record for that address to include several non-routable addresses, reducing the load on their servers. Some applications affected include older Internet Explorer browsers, Java, and Norton Antivirus (which may manifest itself as Microsoft Word being very slow to start). Hope this helps a few people, and if you have other apps with problems, please post about them below.
Self-signed certificates are fine for Joe-Hobby website, but when you're about to enter a credit card number online it's assuring to see that the SSL cert is signed by a real organization and not "l33t_d00d@hotmail.com"
Trolling is a art,
saying that your certificate is expired or not yet valid...except that it is...you need to go here.
Because of the crl problems, Explorer has been acting slowly doing some seemingly unrelated activities. Copying or right-clicking on folders often is followed by a several second hang. To workaround, deselect "Check for publisher's certificate revocation" under the Advanced setting for IE (even though it is not IE running, that's where the setting should be changed). After this, no more Explorer hangs. Hope this helps someone. If you know why Explorer is checking crls for anything when doing a copy operation on files, please post.
There's software out there so anyone can sign a certificate. Who needs the suits at Verisign?
Because a cert signed by you is useful for nothing more than "This conversation is encrypted, and I say I'm me." A cert signed by a Verisign translates to "This conversation is encrypted, and Verisign says I'm me."
What good is that? Well, not much among geeks, we don't trust Verisign further than we can throw them, but we're depending on them to keep this silly DNS thing going. However, web browsers are set with a default list of trusted "Certificate Authorites" who are allowed to sign certificates. Companies who are on those lists can sign a certificate that'll work without errors, anybody else's certificate will prompt a message indicating that the name's right, the time's valid, but the issuing authority isn't on the list of authorities you trust. (You can manually add a new authority if you want... but try convincing users to do that!)
The problem is, so many cheapskates have now signed their own certificate that the bogus authority error isn't stopping users since it's so common when nothing's really wrong. As a result, we're seeing a lot of look alike sites use SSL to get the padlock to come up, and users not being phased by the red-flag alerts that this doesn't seem to be the site they think it is.
Uh, Thawte is owned by Verisign, smart guy...
But they are a lot cheaper for some reason... Go figure...
Very nice of them to.. I don't know.. let someone know before today. We spent a ton of staff time this morning trying to figure out why we could connect to our servers but not the payment engines via ssl. 4 hours later we figured it out.
= fs alert%2F57436n dors/exp-gsid-s sl.html
Couple of nice links.
http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/retrieve.pl?doc
http://www.verisign.com/support/ve
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies