Slashdot Mirror
Server Snafu Makes Microsoft Beg For CA Audit Data From Its Partners (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft, just like Google, Apple, and Mozilla, is part of the CA/BForum, an organization of web browser vendors and certification authorities (CAs). As a browser vendor, Microsoft maintains a list of authorized CAs and their respective root certificates. According to a message on the CA/BForum, there was an error on the server that was running a CRM application that managed this list of trusted certificates and the adjacent details regarding each certificate and CA. The data is lost forever and Microsoft is now asking CAs to resend their most recent audits. Currently a lot of certs are broken in Edge and IE. Microsoft says that it lost audit data for 147 root certificates, which resulted in many SSL/TLS certificates showing errors inside the company's products.
Actually, what seems to have happened is that they _did_ have a backup. But, they had to roll back to an old one.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
They aren't missing the certificate data, but rather the audit data associated with those certificates which is NOT stored with the certificates that are on computers everywhere. The summary is a bit misleading on that point.
It a load of rubbish from the original author. There's no reason whatsoever that loss of this data would cause problems in IE or Edge. Removing roots from MS's program doesn't happen without human input.