Mozilla has blocked DarkMatter's Certificate Authority certificates

Mozilla placed intermediate certificates of the DarkMatter certification authority in the list of revoked certificates (OneCRL), the use of which leads to a warning in the Firefox browser.

Certificates were blocked after a four-month review application from DarkMatter for inclusion in the supported Mozilla root certificate list. Until now, trust in DarkMatter has been provided by intermediate certificates signed by the active certification authority QuoVadis, but the DarkMatter root certificate has not yet been added to browsers. The pending request from DarkMatter to add the root certificate, as well as all new requests from DigitalTrust (a subsidiary of DarkMatter designated to run the certification authority), is recommended to be denied.

During the analysis, issues were identified with entropy in certificate generation and possible facts emerged regarding the use of DarkMatter certificates for conducting surveillance and intercepting HTTPS traffic. Reports of the use of DarkMatter certificates for surveillance have come from several independent sources, and since issuing certificates for such purposes violates Mozilla's requirements for certification authorities, a decision was made to block the intermediate certificates of DarkMatter.

In January, Reuters published information regarding DarkMatter's involvement in 'Project Raven', conducted by the intelligence services of the United Arab Emirates to compromise the accounts of journalists, human rights activists, and foreign representatives. In response, DarkMatter stated that the information cited in the article is not accurate. In February, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

urged Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Microsoft not to include DarkMatter in their root certificate stores and to revoke existing intermediate certificates. EFF representatives compared DarkMatter's application for inclusion in the root certificate list to a fox trying to sneak into a henhouse. Similar mentions of DarkMatter's involvement in conducting surveillance were later referenced in an investigation conducted by the publication.

Аналогичные упоминания причастности DarkMatter к организации слежки позднее были упомянуты в расследовании, проведённом изданием The New York TimesHowever, no direct evidence was presented, and DarkMatter continued to deny its involvement in the mentioned intelligence operations. Ultimately, Mozilla assessed the positions of various parties and concluded that maintaining trust in DarkMatter poses a significant risk to users.

Source: opennet.ru