Digital Certificate Authority (CA) Trustwave revealed that it has issued a digital certificate that enabled an unnamed private company to spy on SSL-protected connections within its corporate network, an action that prompted the Mozilla community to debate whether the CA's root certificate should be removed from Firefox.
The certificate issued by Trustwave is known as a subordinate root and enabled its owner to sign digital certificates for virtually any domain on the Internet. The certificate was to be used within a private network within a data loss prevention system, Trustwave said in a blog post on Saturday.
The CA took steps to ensure that the subordinate root could not be stolen or abused. The certificate was stored in a Hardware Security Module, a device built specifically for the management of digital keys, which ensured that its extraction was impossible, Trustwave said.
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