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Firefox-maker Mozilla has joined Google in refusing to recognize SSL certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC). This comes after a security biz in Egypt used a CNNIC-issued intermediate certificate to create unauthorized SSL certs that could be used to trick people into connecting to bogus, password-stealing Gmail.com or Google.com websites. Google, and now Moz, are outraged by CNNIC's sloppiness in the case. CNNIC is run by the Middle Kingdom's government, and handles the .cn domain name registry, IP address allocation and other things as well as issuing SSL certificates for encrypted websites via intermediaries. "After reviewing the circumstances and a robust discussion on our public mailing list, we have concluded that CNNIC's behaviour in issuing an unconstrained intermediate certificate to a company with no documented PKI practices and with no oversight of how the private key was stored or controlled was an 'egregious practice' as per Mozilla's CA Certificate Enforcement Policy," the Mozilla security team wrote in a Thursday blog post. As a consequence of the incident, all Mozilla products – including the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client, among others – will be updated so that all CNNIC-based certificates issued on or after April 1, 2015 are considered untrusted. Mozilla said it also plans to ask CNNIC for a comprehensive list of all of its current valid certificates. Any certificates issued before April 1 that are not included on this whitelist will also be subject to potential "further action." The move comes following a similar action by Google, which said on Wednesday that it would stop recognizing the CNNIC certificate authority in a future update to its Chrome browser. As a result of these actions, Chrome and Firefox users who try to connect via encrypted HTTPS to websites that use CNNIC-issued SSL certificates will see alert messages warning them that their connections may not be secure – even for online banks, e-commerce shops, and other sites that manage sensitive information. CNNIC, which manages both China's .cn country code top-level domain and the system of internationalized domain names that contain Chinese characters, issued a declaration on Thursday condemning Google's ban: 1. The decision that Google has made is unacceptable and unintelligible to CNNIC, and meanwhile CNNIC sincerely urge that Google would take users' rights and interests into full consideration. 2. For the users that CNNIC has already issued the certificates to, we guarantee that your lawful rights and interests will not be affected. Mozilla added, though, that CNNIC could regain its standing but only after proving that it could be trusted with the responsibility of managing a root certificate authority. "CNNIC may, if they wish, re-apply for full inclusion in the Mozilla root store and the removal of this restriction, by going through Mozilla's inclusion process after completing additional steps that the Mozilla community may require as a result of this incident," the nonproifit's security team said. Source

Google's Chrome browser will stop trusting all digital certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Center following a major trust breach last week that led to the issuance of unauthorized credentials for Gmail and several other Google domains. The move could have major consequences for huge numbers of Internet users as Chrome, the world's second most widely used browser, stops recognizing all website certificates issued by CNNIC. That could leave huge numbers of users suddenly unable to connect to banks and e-commerce sites. To give affected website operators time to obtain new credentials from a different certificate authority, Google will wait an unspecified period of time before implementing the change. Once that grace period ends, Google engineers will blacklist both CNNIC's root and extended-validation certificates in Chrome and all other Google software. The unauthorized certificates were issued by Egypt-based MCS Holdings, an intermediate certificate authority that operated under the authority of CNNIC. MCS used the certificates in a man-in-the-middle proxy, a device that intercepts secure connections by masquerading as the intended destination. Such devices are sometimes used by companies to monitor employees' encrypted traffic for legal or human resources reasons. It's one of the first times a certificate authority has faced such a banishment since the downfall of Netherlands-based DigiNotar in 2011. Other CAs, including US-based Trustwave, have also done what CNNIC did without getting the boot. While worldwide Chrome is the No. 2 most used browser, it had a commanding, 52-percent share in China last year, compared to 23 percent for IE. The move was announced on Wednesday evening in an update to last week's blog post disclosing the misissued certificates. The update left open the possibility that CNNIC may be reinstated at an undetermined future date if the group gives a detailed accounting of all currently valid certificates. The update read: As this post was being prepared, it wasn't clear if Mozilla or Microsoft planned to update Firefox and Internet explorer to also stop trusting CNNIC. Firefox 37, released this week, stopped trusting all certificates issued by MCS Holdings, and Microsoft has announced similar plans for Windows. Revoking trust in the root CNNIC certificate would be a much more disruptive course of action, since many more website certificates would be affected. Update 1: In an e-mailed statement, Mozilla Cryptographic Engineering Manager Richard Barnes said: "We believe it is very important to include the Mozilla community in these discussions, so we are taking a bit longer to announce our official plan. We expect to wrap up our discussion in mozilla.dev.security.policy soon, and in the meantime you can see the plan we are currently discussing here." The plan under consideration would: Reject certificates chaining to CNNIC with a notBefore date after a threshold date Request that CNNIC provide a list of currently valid certificates and publish that list so that the community can recognize any back-dated certs Allow CNNIC to re-apply for full inclusion, with some additional requirements (to be discussed on this list) If CNNIC's re-application is unsuccessful, then their root certificates will be removed Update2: Officials with CNNIC have issued a statement that's sharply critical of Google's move. It reads: Source