The controversial certificate authority StartCom will go out of business on January 1, 2018

Pierluigi Paganini November 20, 2017

The Startcom CA board chairman Xiaosheng Tan, announced that the controversial certificate authority will end its activity on January 1, 2018.

The controversial certificate authority StartCom is going to close, according to board chairman Xiaosheng Tan, the business will end its activity on January 1, 2018.

Starting from January 1, 2018, StartCom will no longer issue new digital certificates, but CRL and OCSP service will continue for two years, until the expiration of the StartCom’s three key root pairs.

In July, Google warned website owners that it will completely ban digital certificates issued by the Chinese certificate authority WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom. The Tech giant announced it will no longer trust the WoSign certificates starting with Chrome 61.
Startcom and Wosign certificates have been put on untrusted lists by almost any major browser firms, including Mozilla, Apple, Google and Microsoft.

For this reason, according to Tan the shut down of the CA “would not have a major impact.”

According to w3techs.com, about 0.1 per cent of websites worldwide still use StartCom as an SSL certificate authority.

The following diagram shows the historical trend in the percentage of websites using StartCom.
StartCom CA

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – StartCom CA, PKI)

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