769644 - Develop skeleton addon which uses lightweight update mechanism to dis-trust certificates

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Security, defect)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Firefox now has a built-in addon, the updates for which are used as a vehicle for making quick changes ("hotfixes") to Firefox without having to ship an entire new version:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Desktop/Add-on_hotfix

One of the use cases on that page is:

"We need to distrust a CA. We ship an update to the add-on that makes Firefox distrust it and users are silently updated within 24 hours"

However, I'm not sure we have the information necessary and documented such that we could develop and ship such an addon with confidence within that timeframe. (I even have a lingering doubt that the necessary APIs are available from addon code, but I'm very open to being proved wrong about that. At the least, it may require an XPCOM component, which would then have to be compiled per-platform.)

We should make sure this is possible, and develop a test addon which does it. If such a development takes two weeks, then we are vindicated in our decision to do so before a crisis occurs!

Gerv

Comment 1

[:Cykesiopka]

Is this still needed now that we have OneCRL?

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

No; OneCRL is the correct solution to this problem. This idea was a stop-gap.

Gerv