Mozilla has decided to remove the certification authority (CA) certificate of Turkey-based E-Guven Elektronik Bilgi Guvenligi A.S. due to its failure to provide audit statements.
E-Guven, incorporated by the Turkish industrial group Eczacıbaşı and the Turkey Informatics Foundation, aims at developing information security infrastructure in the country. According to its website, the company is the first electronic certificate service provider and it “has been performing its activities within the scope of Electronic Signature Law under the supervision of IT and Communication Authority, since it has been legally authorized.”
Mozilla says CAs must be audited by an independent party every year. However, E-Guven was last audited in October 2013 and even then the verification wasn’t performed as dictated by Mozilla’s CA Certificate Inclusion Policy.
“I have been communicating these problems to E-Guven for a few months, and I have seen no progress in remediation,” said Kathleen Wilson, owner of Mozilla’s CA Certificates Module and Policy.
The Mozilla community has decided to remove the E-Guven CA certificate in Firefox 38, which is scheduled to be released on May 12.
“The integrity of the secure Web depends on CAs issuing certificates that correctly attest to the identity of websites. Mozilla products ship a default list of CA certificates, which may change with each security patch or new version of the product,” Wilson explained in a blog post on Monday. “Inclusion of a CA certificate in Mozilla products involves a rigorous process and evaluation of the CA’s public-facing policy documentation and audit statements, in order to verify that the CA conforms to the criteria required by Mozilla’s CA Certificate Inclusion Policy.”
Wilson noted that the compatibility impact resulting from the removal of this root certificate is minimal as it is only responsible for roughly one in a million validations.
E-Guven hasn’t responded to SecurityWeek’s request for comment by the time of publication.
Earlier this month, Mozilla announced its decision to ban new certificates from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) after the organization issued an unconstrained intermediate certificate to an Egypt-based company that issued unauthorized certificates for several Google domains.
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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