Google announced that root certificate issued by the China Internet Network Center CNNIC would not be recognized by Chrome browser. CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) is a government agency within Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information. Apart from being an Internet Network Center it also operated Chinese national domain .CN.
About two weeks ago Google discovered several shell webpages that claimed to be resources of the corporation and used corresponding certificates. The investigation established that these certificates were issued by CNNIC to a company MCS Holdings registered in Egypt. It is supposed that shell webpages could have been used to intercept internal traffic of the corporation and to spy on Chinese users of Google.
Certificates were quickly blocked; CNNIC assured that this would never happen in the future. However, Google, obviously, considered these measures to be insufficient and decided to delete CNNIC certification from all software products beginning with the next version of Chrome browser. Yesterday it became known that the same decision was made by Mozilla Foundation that develops and supports Firefox browser.
Such a way, in the near future two of the most popular browsers will prevent visiting webpages that have CNNIC certificates by displaying a warning that the connection is not reliable. CNNIC has already called this decision unacceptable, the company believes that it violated rights and interests of the users.
