GitHub and BitBucket's SSL Provider's Cert has expired | Hacker News Reader

GitHub and BitBucket's SSL Provider's Cert has expired

github.com

72 pointshiroprot43 comments

I work with the Certificate Provider DigiCert and confirm that the expired intermediate is a deprecated certificate no longer used in installs. Some sites still have it installed on their server or users might have it installed on their local machine.

If you are on Chrome, follow @huntaub's suggestion and remove the expired certificate from keychain and restart.

We've been notifying customers of the expiration and have Technical Support in the office 24 hours to help the sites who need help updating the certificate.

We're also reaching out to the sites we see having issues online.

For a full explanation on the legacy intermediate explanation and affected users see DigiCert's post:

https://blog.digicert.com/expired-intermediate-certificate/

Thanks, very helpful, though I think affected users are going to want to use this link instead:

http://blog.digicert.com/expired-intermediate-certificate/

I just got hit with this issue. There doesn't seem to be any information on DigiCert's site or Github's.

edit: For some reason, deleting the expired DigiCert certificate from Keychain (and restarting Chrome) allowed it to find a valid chain to the Github certificate. I would recommend doing this if you want to get to Github without turning off SSL.

edit2: (Or they just fixed it and I restarted Chrome.) Can anyone confirm that it works now (without deleting the Intermediate Cert)?

https://twitter.com/flavmartins/status/493102588410494976

It doesn't for me.

A side-project I'm working on will alert you when SSL certificates are about to expire, preventing these things from happening. It'll also show you a overview of all the expiration dates of your certificates and domains, updated automatically.

It's not live yet, but if you're interested you can sign up for the launch mail here:

http://www.domainsquire.com

Such a thing would have been very helpful to me. My domain's SSL cert expired and I got a new one but didn't notice that my provider had shipped a different, newer intermediate certificate.

For three weeks I was showing a great big THIS CONNECTION IS UNTRUSTED screen to Firefox users and didn't know it.

It surprises me how common it is, which made me build Domainsquire to fix it. As today's event shows it even happens to the big boys, and this is a predictable, pre-emptively solvable downtime event, so it really shouldn't happen.

Thank you for building this. Signed up.

Cheers!

If this is anything like the issues we've seen at Stripe, the problem is probably an obsolete cross-signed root in your login keychain. It's caused by a certificate with CN="DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA" but signed by some other authority rather than being self-signed. It's not clear to us how these are getting into people's login keychains, as they're not present on a fresh install.

Typically servers will present their certificate and intermediates but not the root, under the assumption that browsers must already have the root in their CA store. So for DigiCert that would probably be all the certs up to but not including "DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA".

You can see the presented cert chain using `openssl s_client -showcerts ...` or the Certification Paths section of the Qualys SSL Labs Test: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=github.com

Do you see an expired "DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA" certificate in your login keychain? If so, delete it. If not, something weirder may be going on.

That is interesting, it's in my login keychain, as well, alongside "DigiCert Global CA" that expired on the 14th.

The most obvious answer would be that it's being installed by some widely-used piece of software, but I don't know what.

Pity the "Date Modified" column is empty, and I don't think there's really a log of what added things to the keychain.

I'd love to hear theories for what might have installed it. If anyone still has that certificate, it would be helpful to export it and email it to support@stripe.com.

We've worked around the issue for now by not using EV certificates, which isn't a great solution.

I've sent both the recently expired DigiCert certs.

Could be just about anything. In my case, my keychain has followed me from one Mac to the next since before the cert that expired today was ever issued, so it could have ended up in there anytime in the last ~8 years from anything I might have had installed dating back to my PowerBook G4...

Virtualization software might be a candidate.

Actually, I just had another thought: Steam. And when I just tried to go to https://store.steampowered.com/, guess what certificate is in the trust chain?

Two Macs here, both with Steam, both have the problem. Oh, they both have VirtualBox as well.

I had the expired certificate. I've never installed Steam, but I have installed VMWare Fusion.

I used to have the cert (deleted a while ago), and I've never installed Steam.

It's the same scenario at GitHub. I've had a half-dozen or so GitHub users report cert chain issues on OS X over the last year and a half and it has always turned out to be a stray cert in the 'login' keychain. Still no definitive explanation for where the cert is coming from, but in at least one case the user had been prompted to import the cert by the code signing utilities.

My understanding from DigiCert is the cross-signing with Entrust had been done awhile back to improve mobile browser compatibility. Perhaps this is some strange combination of developer tools installed and the platform they are developing for...

Just a heads-up for those who can't find the expired certificate: in keychain access, you have to click on "View > Show Expired Certificates".

Thank you!

Looks like digicert itself screwed up - getting an invalid certificate error on digicert.com. Their twitter feed says they are in contact with GitHub, DigitalOcean, Namecheap, Stripe, Pingdom, and so on. This was a big error, and even they made the mistake on their own root domain.

I'm having this issue as well. I deleted all digicert certificates from my keychain just in case. Still couldn't get to Github. I can get to the DigiCert Root Certificates download page, but it gives me an invalid certificate warning. It looks like the same issue as Github.

I really, really don't feel comfortable downloading a ROOT CERTIFICATE with an SSL warning on the page. Who knows what could be compromised in this case?

I'm going to try a couple other things first; I'd like to hear from a security expert, should we find this scary or just a small hiccup?

I had an outstanding OSX update, installed that and rebooted. One of the two fixed it for me. Note: I DID NOT have to install the the root certificates, and if anyone else gets an SSL warning from DigiCert's root cert download site, I strongly recommend against downloading anything from there.

Download your required certificate from here and it should work like charm

https://www.digicert.com/digicert-root-certificates.htm

This is the right solution.

"DigiCert High Assurance EV Root CA" (Try test link before downloading). Add to KeyChain, restart browser.

Hah! I'm working on a side project to solve this problem: http://www.renewalmonitor.com/

The idea is that the service will monitor things like domains and ssl expiry dates and then alert you in an increasingly obnoxious manner as the expiration date gets closer.

My MVP has just needs a few more finishing touches and then I'll send it live. In the meantime, you can signup on the waiting list.

Cheers.

A fix to remove the expired cert right now:

https://twitter.com/aarongraves/status/493116549599739905

Pretty sure this is on Digicert's side, but we (at GitHub) are investigating to make sure of that.

I'm seeing the same issue on both GitHub and Heroku today as well. "Cannot connect to the real www.heroku.com

Something is currently interfering with your secure connection to www.heroku.com.

Try to reload this page in a few minutes or after switching to a new network. "

I just upgraded the Cert from DigiCert Website. It's workable for 2038 now. Enough time. Who knows Github exist by that time or not.

Is this only an issue for those using Google Chrome? I haven't had any SSL issues with Github all day using Firefox.

No, git fetch from MacOSX 10.10 command line as well:

    Maxims-MacBook-Air:walk maximveksler$ git up
    Fetching origin
    fatal: unable to access ‘https://github.com/maximveksler/walk.git/': SSL certificate problem: Invalid certificate chain
    error: Could not fetch origin
    `git fetch` failed

not sure why, but i had to remove all the certificates and download its from here https://www.digicert.com/digicert-root-certificates.htm

I'm always surprised at how often this tends to happen to many startups/companies

step tutorial http://gianpaj.com/post/93100630815/cant-access-github-on-ch...

This certificate expiration also caused not using Github and HomeBrew from CLI.

bitbucket as well

I thought you might have been joking. Weird.

I thought someone was after my private repositories

Their SSL chain includes an expired DigiCert certificate as well.

iwantmydomain as well https://twitter.com/mvxlr/status/493111861131227137

What a fuck up. How did that go unnoticed.

It was noticed, but tested across a number of platforms did not show errors except for Android < v3.

The issue is with a weird Mac OS X chain issue that causes a chain to be downloaded to the login keystore in Keychain. Mac forces it to be used when validating the certificate chain. Most users have removed the cert and everything is working as it should.

Tracking down how and why that happens on Mac OS X is tough. Reaching Apple engineers has not been extremely successful. Not Apple's fault. Usually SSL Root Chain groups are distributed with organizations so it's not always clear who to go to.

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