The impact of this incident is very unevenly spread.
Over 10 years ago, Mozilla shipped OneCRL [1]. We remediated this incident in a couple of hours for Firefox users who were protected automatically without the need for updates. Chrome, Apple and Microsoft have similar tooling. Since then, we've built more advanced tooling to handle revocation at scale for leaf certs (CRLite [2]).
However, for the rest of the ecosystem, there has been little to no investment in revocation and for those clients, this is a massive problem. Hopefully, we'll see folks invest now. Efforts like upki [3] look promising.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/03/03/revoking-interm...
[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/08/crlite-fast-private-and-co...
More on upki:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/an-update-on-upki/77063
My interest in building OneCRL support into upki has definitely increased this week. Issue:
https://github.com/rustls/upki/issues/229
I'm hoping some organizations will step forward to fund work on this.
(Note that curl on Ubuntu 26.10 now has CRLite support baked via upki -- unfortunately that doesn't help with this because AIUI CRLite is only for end entities, not for intermediate certificates.)
It's very inconsistent for me even on just Firefox. On multiple systems running different instances of Firefox, checking with https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/:
One blocks everything; one blocks 6 out of 12; one blocks the other 6 out of 12; one blocks nothing.
You mean the response was uneven. The impact was a complete and total potential compromise of literally everyone. Every domain. Every client using one of the public root programs. Every user of those clients.
You mean you and Chrome stopped supporting normal CRLs and OCSP, replacing (for normal users) these distributed-trust technologies with central lists controlled by browsers
Here's a question for Mozilla et. al.:
It's cute you have a magic DIY CRL. You accepted these assholes into your root program.
They lost the KEYS.
What is the screening process for CA's that can't be bothered to use a HSM?
Even Honest Achmed wasn't this careless.
Firefox Mobile 158.0 on Android 17 (Pixel 7) connects to all the demo sites with zero warnings. Any idea why the "automatic protection without updates" doesn't seem to be working with that combination?