“Google to sanction Symantec for misissuing security certificates” – Zeljka Zorz reporting in Help Net Security: “In a post on a developers’ forum [link], software engineer on the Google Chrome team Ryan Sleevi has announced Google’s plan to start gradually distrust all existing Symantec-issued certificates, and push for their replacement with new, fully revalidated certificates that will be compliant to the current baseline requirements. ... Sleevi says that the Google Chrome team has been investigating Symantec Corporation’s failures to properly validate certificates for the last two months, and they concluded that at least 30,000 certificates have been misissued by them.”

— Update / Symantec Backs Its CA: Symantec today published a blog post strongly objecting to Google’s action – “We strongly object to the action Google has taken to target Symantec SSL/TLS certificates in the Chrome browser. This action was unexpected, and we believe the blog post was irresponsible. ... Google’s statements about our issuance practices and the scope of our past mis-issuances are exaggerated and misleading. ... 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. While all major CAs have experienced SSL/TLS certificate mis-issuance events, Google has singled out the Symantec Certificate Authority in its proposal even though the mis-issuance event identified in Google’s blog post involved several CAs.”

— Symantec vs. Google: The CA Fight Continues. What do you need to know? Johannes Ullrich / March 27: “Regardless if we agree or do not agree with Google’s action on this, here are some of the issues you need to be aware off: 1. Right now, this is just a proposal. Nothing has been implemented yet, and Google may change its mind, or change its schedule. 2. This issue will only affect Google Chrome users. Google Chrome is by some counts currently the most commonly used browser. But it will only affect HTTP(S), not other services like imap that are not supported by Chrome. It will also not affect internal web services that are not used by browsers…”