Digital ID

The controversial certificate authority StartCom will go out of business on January 1, 2018

The Startcom CA board chairman Xiaosheng Tan, announced that the controversial certificate authority will end its activity on January 1, 2018.

The controversial certificate authority StartCom is going to close, according to board chairman Xiaosheng Tan, the business will end its activity on January 1, 2018.

Starting from January 1, 2018, StartCom will no longer issue new digital certificates, but CRL and OCSP service will continue for two years, until the expiration of the StartCom’s three key root pairs.

In July, Google warned website owners that it will completely ban digital certificates issued by the Chinese certificate authority WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom. The Tech giant announced it will no longer trust the WoSign certificates starting with Chrome 61.
Startcom and Wosign certificates have been put on untrusted lists by almost any major browser firms, including Mozilla, Apple, Google and Microsoft.

For this reason, according to Tan the shut down of the CA “would not have a major impact.”

According to w3techs.com, about 0.1 per cent of websites worldwide still use StartCom as an SSL certificate authority.

The following diagram shows the historical trend in the percentage of websites using StartCom.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – StartCom CA, PKI)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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