On Tue, 2014-11-18 at 12:11 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
Firefox also builds a repository of intermediate certificates over
time
and uses them automatically to fill gaps in certificate chains for
completely unrelated sites. This leads to somewhat non-predictable
behavior regarding the set of sites to which Firefox can connect
reliably. This is difficult to emulate in one-shot command line
tools
such as wget which do not keep any local state by default.
And that's arguably the biggest problem of all. The goal is to reduce
certificate validation failures for users who have seen a particular
intermediate cert before, but the effect is that web developers get
false positives when testing whether their sites are set up properly or
not. This just makes things worse in the long run.
Chrome does this as well (when using NSS -- not sure if Chrome on Linux
uses NSS, but Chrome on Windows does).