Heartbleed certificate revocation tsunami yet to arrive

By

By

By

Paul Mutton

Paul Mutton

Paul Mutton

|

|

|

April 10, 2014

April 10, 2014

April 10, 2014

Reddit logo

Only 30,000 of the 500,000+ SSL certificates affected by the Heartbleed bug have been reissued up until today, and even fewer certificates have been revoked.


There has been a noticeable rise in certificate re-issuance since 7 April 2014


Some of the first sites to deploy newly issued certificates in response to the OpenSSL vulnerability included Yahoo, Adobe, CloudFlare, DuckDuckGo, GitHub, Reddit , Launchpad, PayPal, Netflix and Amazon's CloudFront content delivery network.

Such is the haste to fix the fallout of the Heartbleed bug, some certificate authorities and website administrators have been making careless mistakes. PayPal's Hosted Message Applications, such as the one at https://view.paypal-communication.com, are now using Extended Validation certificates issued by VeriSign on 10 April 2014. The CAB Forum requires certificate authorities to adhere to a stringent set of guidelines [pdf] when issuing EV certificates, and it is the CA's responsibility to verify the accuracy of the information in the certificate. In particular, they must verify that the legal name of the subject in an EV certificate matches the name which appears on official government records.

However, this verification does not appear to have been performed correctly in the case of these certificates, as they have been erroneously issued to an organisation named "PayPal, Inc.

Don't want to miss out on updates?

Don't want to miss out on updates?

Don't want to miss out on updates?

Join our mailing list for regular blog posts and case studies from Netcraft.

Up next