If it failed open, anyone unlucky enough to update their extensions could end up having a malicious version installed. It also would have taken longer to notice.

It should fail 'locked'. continue to allow installed addons to work, notify the user of issue, disable any updates without explicit request by the user.

This disables NoScript on Tor Browser. That's much worse than the slim chance of a malicious extension being installed.

So why not just disable extension updates instead of disabling the extensions themselves?

Presumably because how would it differentiate between a legit "already installed" extension with a signature that cannot be verified, and an extension installed by malware that also cannot be verified?

Browsers can only protect against malicious websites and malicious extensions. They can't protect against malware. Even without any cert problems, malware on your machine can modify the browser executable/process to insert whatever code it wants.

With this reduced threat model, it's easy to simply keep existing pre-installed extensions available, and disable updates. Your only problem is if a pre-installed extension is malicious or has a vulnerability, it will remain.

> Presumably because how would it differentiate between a legit "already installed" extension with a signature that cannot be verified, and an extension installed by malware that also cannot be verified?

This is why a signature can also be accompanied by a trusted time stamp which can confirm that the signature was made while the certificate was valid.

This is the common way to sign all Windows software to avoid this exact kind of problem.

Yes, that implies this is a known and solved problem. It’s embarrassing for Mozilla to not have prepared for this.

If an extension was already installed, it passed the signature check at the time of installation. I'm not sure what benefits we get from periodically re-running the exact same check -- particularly when balanced against the risks of the re-checks, which are now obvious.

Personally I despise the idea of the software already on my pc being dependent on signatures stored on a remote server. I installed it and Mozilla can fuck right off. It's my responsibility to police what software is on my computer, not theirs.

According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19824520 the signatures are on the extensions themselves, not on a remote server.

because that would make too much sense.

Updating with an expired cert doesn't automatically result in compromise.

Yes, but what's the point of cert expiration? Is it safe to have certs that never expire? I believe there is a security benefit to expiration. Expiration is useless if it's never enforced.

Probably the correct behavior is to have some sort of semi-annoying popup when it expires, and then only a week later do the full blocking. You need to strike the right balance of making it annoying enough that it can't be ignored by everyone (otherwise you just have the exact same problem, just delayed a week) and that fear of it happening is a sufficient motivator to stop people lazily relying on the grace period, but also not too annoying that it makes a lot of people quit. You also want to avoid permission fatigue.

It's a great argument against centrally controlled walled gardens. Basically breaking or compromising a single certificate has a widespread impact. Even Tor browser is impacted. For most of us this is a temporary inconvenience but there are people whose personal security depends on some of the extensions that just stopped working.

On a positive note, it's been a while since I browsed without a lot of extensions. Ads are still annoying and I noticed some extensions apparently had more of a performance impact than you'd hope.

Mine still work. I tried to set my clock to two days ago to avoid it and promptly got errors on every HTTPS site I visited. Damned if you do, damned if you don't :/

A warning yellow bar appeared for me below the URL bar.

It wasn't quite all for me, it left 3 of the 20ish I have installed.