Web Browsers Drop Mysterious Company With Ties To US Military Contractor

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Major web browsers moved Wednesday to stop using a mysterious software company that certified websites were secure, three weeks after The Washington Post reported its connections to a U.S. military contractor. Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Edge said they would stop trusting new certificates from TrustCor Systems that vouched for the legitimacy of sites reached by their users, capping weeks of online arguments among their technology experts, outside researchers and TrustCor, which said it had no ongoing ties of concern. Other tech companies are expected to follow suit. The Post reported on Nov. 8 that TrustCor's Panamanian registration records showed the same slate of officers, agents and partners as a spyware-maker identified this year as an affiliate of Arizona-based Packet Forensics, which has sold communication interception services to U.S. government agencies for more than a decade. One of those contracts listed the "place of performance" as Fort Meade, Md., the home of the National Security Agency and the Pentagon's Cyber Command. The case has put a new spotlight on the obscure systems of trust and checks that allow people to rely on the internet for most purposes. Browsers typically have more than a hundred authorities approved by default, including government-owned ones and small companies, to seamlessly attest that secure websites are what they purport to be."Certificate Authorities have highly trusted roles in the internet ecosystem and it is unacceptable for a CA to be closely tied, through ownership and operation, to a company engaged in the distribution of malware," Mozilla's Kathleen Wilson wrote to a mailing list for browser security experts. "Trustcor's responses via their Vice President of CA operations further substantiates the factual basis for Mozilla's concerns."

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