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Google Reducing Trust In Symantec Certificates Following Numerous Slip-Ups (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: Google Chrome engineers announced plans to gradually remove trust in old Symantec SSL certificates and intent to reduce the accepted validity period of newly issued Symantec certificates, following repeated slip-ups on the part of Symantec. Google's decision comes after the conclusion of an investigation that started on January 19, which unearthed several problems with Symantec's certificate issuance process, such as 30,000 misused certificates. In September 2015, Google also discovered that Symantec issued SSL certificates for Google.com without authorization. Symantec blamed the incident on three rogue employees, whom it later fired. This move from Google will force all owners of older Symantec certificates to request a new one. Google hopes that by that point, Symantec would have revamped its infrastructure and will be following the rules agreed upon by all the other CAs and browser makers.

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Bluecoat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    They issued root faking ability to bluecoat. Their certs are untrustable at this point.

  2. Re:The Dying Days of the Certificate industry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    And?

    If somebody is capable of getting into the system far enough that they can spoof the authentication methods Let's Encrypt uses to verify ownership/control of the domain, they can also, in all likelihood, gain access to the private key as well.

    If they can gain access to the private key, then that's it: game over. Doesn't matter what you do, TLS is not going to save your customers' hides. The only way to deal with that problem is to lock down the server so they can't get back in, and create a new certificate, revoking the old one.

    TLS is not a panacea for poor server-side security - it's an adjunct to it. If server security has been broken, TLS can't fix it.