How to remove DarkMatter Certificates from Firefox

Quote:

Cyber-security company DarkMatter, based in the United Arab Emirates, applied to become a top-level certificate authority in Mozilla's root certificate program recently.

Certificates are a cornerstone of today's Internet; HTTPS ensures that communication is encrypted. A company in control of a root CA could potentially decrypt traffic that it has access to.

A Reuter's article links DarkMatter to the United Arab Emirates government and surveillance operations. One such operation, called Karma, saw the team hack iPhones of "hundreds of activists, political leaders, and suspected terrorists" according to Reuters.

The EFF notes that DarkMatter's "business objectives directly depend on intercepting end-user traffic on behalf of snooping governments".

DarkMatter controls an intermediary certificate already called QuoVadis. QuoVadis is owned by DigiCert which means that there is some oversight in place currently.

Firefox users, and anyone else who has access to tools to manage certificates, might want to remove the intermediary certificates from the certification store. You may remove the root certificate from Firefox using the same method if Mozilla, or anyone else, goes ahead with the inclusion of the root certificate in Firefox.

Note: As some readers have pointed out, certificates get restored with every update. You may also need to clear a site's cache if you run into loading issues. See this guide.

Attention: Not all QuoVadis certificates are bad. It is not possible to just exclude some, however. removing the certificates may render some sites unusable.