Mozilla to strengthen SSL certificate verification in Firefox

  • 25 April 2014
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The software maker will pay $10,000 for any critical vulnerability found in its new certificate verification code

Mozilla plans to more strictly enforce industry best practices for SSL certificates in future versions of Firefox with a new certificate verification system.
The new system will be implemented as a library called "mozilla: : pkix" and will start being used by Firefox 31, which is expected to be released in July.
 
Many of the certificate verification changes in the new library are subtle and are related to technical requirements specified in the "Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates" issued by the Certification Authority/Browser (CAB) Forum. However, some of the behavior modifications also stem from changes Mozilla made to its own policy for trusting CA certificates.
 
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The following article is a update on Mozilla SSL certificate verification(

(Latest Firefox version adds protection against rogue SSL certificates)

 
By Jeremy Kirk | IDG News Service  Posted on 9/3/2014
 
Mozilla has added a defense in its latest version of Firefox that would help prevent hackers from intercepting data intended for major online services.
The feature, known as certificate key pinning, allows online services to specify which SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Security Layer) certificates are valid for their services. The certificates are used to verify a site is legitimate and to encrypt data traffic
 
The idea is to prevent attacks such as the one that affected Google in 2011, targeting Gmail users. A Dutch certificate authority (CA), Diginotar, was either tricked or hacked and issued a valid SSL certificate that would work for a Google domain.
In theory, that allowed the hackers to set up a fake website that looked like Gmail and didn't trigger a browser warning of an invalid SSL certificate. Security experts have long warned that attacks targeting certificate authorities are a threat.
 
InforWorld/ full article here/ http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/latest-firefox-version-adds-protection-against-rogue-ssl-certificates-249658
 

 

 

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