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Comment by STRML | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried about this - they state:

  We are rolling back to the older cert now, but since the registry is distributed 
  by a global CDN this process is slower than we’d like, and we don’t want 
  to break things (further) by rushing the process.

If they roll back to the older cert, every install of npm that was "fixed" via the steps in the last post, or updated to latest (node v10.0.26/npm v1.4.4) will break. Perhaps I am missing something but it sounds as though they intend to follow up breaking most npm installs by breaking most npm installs yet again.

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That's not correct. The latest npm (and any npm configured with ca="") will use the CA baked into your operating system's version of OpenSSL. Our old cert, from GlobalSign, works just fine with OpenSSL.

So you're reverting to a cert that is not the old self-signed cert?

Correct. It is a GlobalSign cert that was donated to the Node.js project. Once we became a company we had to stop using it, both from an abundance of caution, security wise, since we were not the only ones who had the cert, but also because it wasn't right to be using a free cert for our new, for-profit entity.

But moving to our new, self-owned cert in a way that broke anything was avoidable, and a huge error on our part.

I see. And that old cert will work with old npm clients?

Additionally, what are your thoughts on signing the digicert CA with the npm CA as mentioned here [1], thus fixing old clients and avoiding another cert switch?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7322970

Any npm downloaded after ~August of 2012, which is when the GlobalSign CA was added to the client:

https://github.com/npm/npmconf/commit/d7ef61c8d9ae87f39482c5...

I believe we considered adding the npmCA and dismissed it, but it has been a long week and I can no longer recall why. I will bring it up and post an update here next week.

Thanks for the updates and finding the time to post during what's certainly been a hectic day.

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