As the MD5 algorithm is obviously not secure anymore, MD5 signature
support should be removed as soon as reasonably possible. Due to the
high number of certificates currently around that would become invalid
if MD5 was deactivated now, it is currently not realistic do do it
immediately.
Instead, I would suggest announcing a fixed date at which MD5 signature
support will be disabled in all mozilla products, regardless of how
many certificates with such signatures will still be around at that
time. This date should probably be something about 1 year + 2 months
after the announcement to allow anyone who still issues MD5
certificates enough time to change that and then 1 year so most of the
issued certificates are exchanged by new ones by then. For anybody who
uses MD5-signed certificates with a validity >1 year, this would still
be plenty of time to replace them.
Intermediate CA certificates with a long lifespan signed using the MD5
algorithm could be explicitly added to the cert store (and marked as
trusted) until their expiration date. This way, only few users should
be affected by the change.
In order to do a clean removal of MD5 in approximately one or two years
without affecting many users, the announcement would have to be issued
soon in order to give enough time for the old certs to expire. I think
that not issuing such a final date could lead to many MD5 certs being
issued (for example, by sub-CAs) and thus still in circulation whan MD5
will be broken even more, so a hurried removal of MD5 will then be
unavoidable.
Jan
--
Please avoid sending mails, use the group instead.
If you really need to send me an e-mail, mention "FROM NG"
in the subject line, otherwise my spam filter will delete your mail.
Sorry for the inconvenience, thank the spammers...
_______________________________________________
dev-tech-crypto mailing list
dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
