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Symantec thinks Google is being inflammatory. Symantec fired the people who made the test cert a couple of years ago. Here's Symantec's press release: Google

Symantec thinks Google is being inflammatory. Symantec fired the people who made the test cert a couple of years ago. Here's Symantec's press release: Google’s statements about our issuance practices and the scope of our past mis-issuances are exaggerated and misleading. For example, Google’s claim that we have mis-issued 30,000 SSL/TLS certificates is not true. In the event Google is referring to, 127 certificates – not 30,000 – were identified as mis-issued, and they resulted in no consumer harm. We have taken extensive remediation measures to correct this situation, immediately terminated the involved partner’s appointment as a registration authority (RA), and in a move to strengthen the trust of Symantec-issued SSL/TLS certificates, announced the discontinuation of our RA program. This control enhancement is an important move that other public certificate authorities (CAs) have not yet followed.

tialaramex 10y ago
The 30 000 certificates don't have any documentation. The BRs require that a CA keeps documentation showing how they validated the Subject, because without that any CA could issue anything and then say "Er, I forget why, but it was definitely OK" and who can prove they were wrong? CrossCert wasn't able to produce any documentation for the certificates they got Symantec to issue. Maybe their dog ate it, or they kept it in the Recycle Bin on somebody's laptop and then mistakenly hit "Empty" one day. Most likely they simply never created the documentation at all, because Symantec had never asked them to produce it, so why bother? But that means we have no reason, other than a general sense that CrossCert appear to have been incompetent rather than malevolent, to believe any of those certificates was actually validated. On that basis they're mis-issued, and so Symantec revoked them. The 127 certificates discovered by investigators are clearly bogus, some aren't even for valid domain names, but the thousands of others weren't magically fine - we have no idea, and not having any idea is itself unacceptable. It is true that Symantec shut down their entire RA partner programme (the relationship with CrossCert and half a dozen others) without explicitly being told to do that, and personally I felt that might be enough, but Google clearly don't see it the same way.

tialaramex 10y ago

The 30 000 certificates don't have any documentation. The BRs require that a CA keeps documentation showing how they validated the Subject, because without that any CA could issue anything and then say "Er, I forget why, but it was definitely OK" and who can prove they were wrong? CrossCert wasn't able to produce any documentation for the certificates they got Symantec to issue. Maybe their dog ate it, or they kept it in the Recycle Bin on somebody's laptop and then mistakenly hit "Empty" one day. Most likely they simply never created the documentation at all, because Symantec had never asked them to produce it, so why bother? But that means we have no reason, other than a general sense that CrossCert appear to have been incompetent rather than malevolent, to believe any of those certificates was actually validated. On that basis they're mis-issued, and so Symantec revoked them. The 127 certificates discovered by investigators are clearly bogus, some aren't even for valid domain names, but the thousands of others weren't magically fine - we have no idea, and not having any idea is itself unacceptable. It is true that Symantec shut down their entire RA partner programme (the relationship with CrossCert and half a dozen others) without explicitly being told to do that, and personally I felt that might be enough, but Google clearly don't see it the same way.