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[Drew Scott Daniels <543183@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To remove fraudulent certificates like this recent one:
https://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/08/29/fraudulent-google-com-certificate/
a rebuild is required.
See the discussion at lwn.net at:
http://lwn.net/Articles/456798/#Comments

Note the comment about how Internet Explorer doesn't have to be rebuilt and the Microsoft Advisory at:
https://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2607712.mspx

Maybe better Certificate Revocation List (CRL) support is needed.

I haven't yet submitted a bug upstream as Ubuntu may just want to fork
for better enterprise support.

     Drew Daniels
http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/blog

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/543183

Title:
  Updating system certificates requires rebuild

Status in “firefox” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: firefox

  Hi,
  Updating the list of trusted root certificate authorities across all users of a system seems requires rebuilding a library. Non-root certificates may similarly be impacted.

  update-ca-certificates could be a mechanism  to update the root
  certificates used by firefox.

  On a corporate install of firefox, currently the only options to adding an internal root certificate authority are to:
     * Hack it into the user creation script to extract a pre-created profile, and update all the existing users profile directory. This bypasses the random profile directory creation.
     * Re-compile the shared library (.so) containing the root certificate authorities (extra maintenance for dealing with ubuntu package updates).
     * Have every user of the system go through a manual process of adding the root certificate (most users don't know how).
     * Use a plugin extension for firefox (do any exist?) that is automatically used by all users (can this be done?)
     * Have the root certificate signed at great expense by an external root certificate authority already included. CaCert integration would lower the cost but that seems far away, and is still an external authority. These root certificates also might be limited to a single domain (wildcard certificate?) or have other limitations ("low" expiry?, contractual restrictions...).

  It seems unlikely that Mozilla will move away from having the root
  certificates stored in the shared library as it would take some
  control away from them. The shared libary method makes it harder for
  malicious changes to be made, but only by adding the barier of
  recompilation and installation of a shared library.

  Thanks,

       Drew Daniels
  Resume: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/resume.html

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