Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has received a response from Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC) in relation to their proposal last month to decrease the trust in Symantec certificates.
Details pertaining to the proposal
The proposal was to reduce the trust in Symantec certificates to the point where Chrome only relies on certificates issued for up to 279 or less days from the security firm or its subsidiaries. The response is mainly about Symantec claiming that increased audits of their activities will lead to increased transparency. Instead the company is proposing that all active Extended Validation certificates that have been issued be audited.
The auditor could scrutinize all the certificates that were issued by the former partners to the Symantec registration authority (RA). This will also include an external audit to examine the remediation work required to be completed by the end of August.
This is a six months’ time span WebTrust audit falling between December 1 and May 31. It will be followed by the quarterly WebTrust audits for one year with no required action as well as a third party to carry out the processes and systems examination of the Symantec’s certificate operations.
Symantec response
The company reported it supports the initiative to shorter certificate lifespan. From August 31, they will begin to broadly offer only three-month certificates. Domain revalidation of the issued certificates with more than a nine-month lifespan will occur at no cost when they hit the nine-month mark.
Symantec also stated that the Google’s proposal could result in complicated dependencies including embedded devices that needs to be reimaged, organizations with applications that use pinned Symantec certificates failing and mobile apps that need to be updated.
Symantec said, “Many of these organizations estimates that just the planning process to prepare to move to a new certificate authority could take many months.” They added that in some instances, it could take even years due to the unknown as well as the undocumented dependencies.
The shares of Symantec closed up $31.63 after a rise $0.15 or 0.48% on April 28 while Google’s stock closed up $924.52 after a rise $33.08 or 3.71%.