Xolphin News

24 October 2017

Google Chrome has increased the warnings shown to users when visiting insecure HTTP websites without an SSL certificate as of version 62. Chrome has been showing such warnings since January 2017 for fields related to passwords, credit card data and the like. In the new version, Chrome shows this warning for any insecure field. Which warnings were already shown? Starting ...

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9 October 2017

On September 11th 2017 - Google published their final plan for the discontinuation of the support of Symantec SSL certificates, in which they also mentioned the role of DigiCert. The issue between Symantec and Google Due to several incidents with Symantec certificates over the last few years, Google has lost trust in Symantec’s PKI infrastructure. The aim of the following ...

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3 August 2017

Late March 2017 Google announced their plan to take measures against Symantec, which would lead to a lot of issues for the support of Symantec certificates in Google Chrome. Following this announcement, both parties created various proposals on how to solve the situation. Google just announced their final proposal regarding the support of Symantec certificates in Google Chrome. In reaction ...

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29 June 2017

The CA/Browser Forum has specified new rules for domain validation, which will affect the way domain control is checked before issuing certificates. Comodo announced the implementation of these rules at short notice - they will be implemented by July 20th 2017. The adjustments will primarly affect the alternative validation methods CNAME and file validation. These adjusted CA/B Guideliness will ...

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7 June 2017

Last March, Google announced to take measures against Symantec, affecting SSL certificates issued by Symantec in Google Chrome. On May 19, a collective proposal has been published, reducing risk for users of Symantec certificates as well as retaining Google Chrome users’ safety. Since the end of May, many conversations have been held regarding the proposals. The entire discussion can ...

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7 June 2017

Xolphin has new general terms, which replace the old general terms. What has changed? The previous terms were outdated and have been entirely rewritten. The new terms are more readable and explanations about new products like vulnerability scans have been added. The terms and conditions are available in multiple languages and can be downloaded in PDF easily. There is also ...

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12 May 2017

Since thursday night the 11th of May, Comodo suffered from a serious database disruption for quite some time, which made it impossible the execute their CA activities. Due to this they weren’t able to process Comodo requests. By now the disruption has been resolved and the work resumed. What was going on? Comodo uses a database, located in multiple, ...

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24 March 2017

In response to recent incidents at Symantec, Google has announced they will be taking measures affecting certificates issued by Symantec. They have announced plans to stop showing Symantec Extended Validation certificates as Extended Validation as well as adjusting the validity period for Symantec certificates. What happened at Symantec? In the past months, it has become known that Symantec issued ...

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23 February 2017

SHA-1 certificates vulnerable to impersonation in theory is nothing new. Back in 2014, shifting to the new SHA-2 algorithm was already being encouraged. Today, a Dutch researcher cracked SHA-1 in practice. What does this mean? After years of research, Dutch researcher Marc Stevens from CWI Amsterdam (Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) cracked the SHA-1 ...

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13 December 2016

Google recently announced they will make Certificate Transparency mandatory from October 2017. SSL certificates issued after this date have to comply to the Certificate Transparancy demands, otherwise they will be displayed as untrustworthy. What is Certificate Transparency? Certificate Transparency is an open source system that registers SSL certificates and was developed by Google since 2013. In the classic PKI model ...

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