Closed Bug 209214 Opened 22 years ago Closed 21 years ago

There needs to be a way to manage security certificates

Categories

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Settings UI
Type:
enhancement
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: jim9000, Assigned: bugzilla)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

There is no way to manage security certificates in Mozilla Firebird. Some people
need certificates to access certain web sites. There also should be a way to
manage the certificate authorities you accept. This feature is present in the
Mozilla Application Suite.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click Tools, then Options
2. Go through all of the categories

Actual Results:  
There is no way to manage certificates

Expected Results:  
There should be a way to manage certificates
Marking NEW.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
I just ran into this too.

I was trying to access an internal website, that required a cert.

talking to mscott, he thinks:

"i bet firebird just doesn't have any UI hooks for the cert mgr. thunderdbird
was in the same boat until last night when i added access to the cert manager"

maybe the reason it was omitted was due to the cert UI being less than
desirable, or not fitting into the simple firebird UI.  so maybe the UI would
have to be done as an extension, for corporate users.

here's what I ended up doing:

1)  use mozilla to manage my certs
2)  exit both moz and firebird
3)  copy all my .db files from my moz profile to my firebird profile
4)  restart firebird

I was then able to access the site that required a cert.
It is not just corporate users that needs this, many Internet banks uses
certificates to authenticate customers.

Copying files between profiles works, but there is no way to see the actual
certificate, so I have no idea when the certificate will expire, until it is too
late.

Backing up and restoring certificates is an important security feature, as is
editing the trust in certificate authorities, so it would IMHO be less then
ideal if people would have to go hunting for third-party extensions from unknown
sources when they want to do Internet banking.
There is a thread about this at the MozillaZine Forums
(http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=9987).

The certificate manager is still accessible (Thanks to Kareema at the
MozillaZine Forums for posting this):
chrome://pippki/content/certManager.xul
chrome://pippki/content/pref-certs.xul

Since the backend is already there, it shouldn't take much work to implement
this feature.
Copying the .db files does not work for me.  perhaps this is becuase I have a
password on the certificate database?
Oops. Forget my additional comment.  Copying the .db files does work.  I had
just copied them to the wrong profile.
This was evidently a casualty of splitting off the mail from the browser.  The
certificate preference setup went with the mail application.  It should have
been put into both.  So I guess for now you need to install Thunderbird even if
you don't want to use it for mail and use it to manage the ceritificates until
this is fixed.  The good news is that all the code is still in the Thunderbird
build so it should be real easy to add it to Firebird.
William - your assumptions aren't entirely correct.  The fact that it's not in
Firebird is nothing to do with splitting up from Thunderbird - it's simply
because a whole bunch of panels were removed from Firebird in order to simplify
the interface.  Indeed, as comment 2 says, they were not in Thunderbird either,
and had to be added to it.

I don't imagine adding it back would be very hard. However, it was removed
because the UI was a mess, so if it's going to be added back, I assume that
would have to be worked on.  Unless it was added as an extension...
The answer for now is to install the Things They Left Out extension

http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html#Things%20They%20Left%20Out
taking QA contact, sorry about the bugspam
QA Contact: asa → mconnor
Just to add to request for this feature...

Certificates are being used heavily in the UK e-Science programme [1] as a means
of authenticating and authorising users to particular e-Science/Grid resources
[2].  Thus the ability to manage security certificates is highly desirable if
you wish Firebird to be used, and perhaps become the browser of choice, of the
emerging "grid community" [3].  Presently we have to resort to M$ IE (*pteuy*)
and Mozilla.

Murtaza Gulamali
London e-Science Centre

References:
[1] For example, follow the links off: http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/ca/ca.htm
[2] Globus Toolkit 2/3 (http://www.globus.org/security/) is the current primary
 method of accessing grid architectures.
[3] See the documents produced by the Global Grid Forum (GGF) Grid Security
Infrastructure Working Group (GSI-WG -- http://www.ggf.org/2_SEC/GSI.htm)
Fixed, current UI is not permanent, but this will be accessible in the UI.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 21 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
verified fixed 2003-11-09
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs,
filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change
QA Contact: mconnor → preferences
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