Following the implementation of these corrective steps, we expect Symantec to undergo a Point-in-time Readiness Assessment and a third-party security audit. The point-in-time assessment will establish Symantec’s conformance to each of these standards:
WebTrust Principles and Criteria for Certification Authorities
WebTrust Principles and Criteria for Certification Authorities – SSL Baseline with Network Security
WebTrust Principles and Criteria for Certification Authorities – Extended Validation SSL
The third-party security audit must assess:
The veracity of Symantec’s claims that at no time private keys were exposed to Symantec employees by the tool.
That Symantec employees could not use the tool in question to obtain certificates for which the employee controlled the private key.
That Symantec’s audit logging mechanism is reasonably protected from modification, deletion, or tampering, as described in Section 5.4.4 of their CPS.
We may take further action as additional information becomes available to us.
If a favorite website shows up as “dangerous,” it’s often due to user-uploaded bad content or a temporary malware infection. The Site Status will return to normal once the webmaster has cleaned up the website. To help speed up this process, we automatically give the webmaster a heads-up about the problem via Search Console; if you use Google Analytics, we’ll also warn you there if your site has malware on it. (Webmasters, check the help center to learn how to remove malware from your websites.)
We’re constantly working to keep users safe and informed online. Visit the updated Site Status section in the Transparency Report to experience it yourself.
This change is a better visual indication of the security state of the page relative to HTTP.
Chrome users will have fewer security states to learn.
(Not) Warning About Mixed Content
This change will mainly affect HTTPS pages that contain certain mixed content, such as HTTP images.
Site operators face a dilemma: Switching an HTTP site to HTTPS can initially result in mixed content, which is undesirable in the long term but important for debugging the migration. During this process the site may not be fully secured, but it will usually not be less secure than before.
Removing the yellow “caution triangle” badge means that most users will not perceive a warning on mixed content pages during such a migration. We hope that this will encourage site operators to switch to HTTPS sooner rather than later.
Fewer Security States
This change will reduce the number of page security states in Chrome from four to three.
We have to strike a balance: representing the security state of a webpage as accurately as possible, while making sure users are not overwhelmed with too many possible states and details. We’ve come to understand that our yellow “caution triangle” badge can be confusing when compared to the HTTP page icon, and we believe that it is better not to emphasize the difference in security between these two states to most users. For developers and other interested users, it will still be possible to tell the difference by checking whether the URL begins with “https://”.
In the long term, we hope that most sites on the internet will become secure, and we plan to reduce the icon to just two states: secure and not secure. The change announced in this post is a small step in that direction.
