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by nneonneo 2652 days ago
Ok, I’m all for strong security and better SSL infrastructure, but the response to this issue was just totally overboard. The issue - one fixed bit in a 64-bit randomized serial field - does not compromise the security of these certs in any meaningful way, especially not before their natural expiry dates anyway.

The disruption caused by reissuing everything surely exceeded the disruption of this theoretical issue. I guess, on the plus side, we get to find out whether the PKI infrastructure is ready for a mass revocation/replacement event...

1 comments

It's not about whether it compromised security; it's that they didn't adhere to standards. If you're a certificate authority, you need to conform to standards. If you're not, you SHOULD get evicted as an authority, like DigiNotar [1] was for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar

I don't think you can compare misissuing certificates, including *.google.com, to leaving one bit out of 64 marked as 0.