EFF: Cyber-Mercenary Groups Shouldn’t be Trusted in Your Browser or Anywhere Else
Cyber-Mercenary Groups Shouldn’t be Trusted in Your Browser or Anywhere Else DarkMatter, the notorious cyber-mercenary firm based in the United Arab Emirates, is seeking to become approved as a top-level certificate authority in Mozilla’s root certificate program. Giving such a trusted position to this company would be a very bad idea. DarkMatter has a business interest in subverting encryption, and would be able to potentially decrypt any HTTPS traffic they intercepted. One of the things HTTPS is good at is protecting your private communications from snooping governments—and when governments want to snoop, they regularly hire DarkMatter to do their dirty work. Membership in the root certificate program is the way in which Mozilla decides which certificate authorities (CAs) get to have their root certificates trusted in Firefox. Mozilla’s list of trusted root certificates is also used in many other products, including the Linux operating system. Browsers rely on this lis...