How do I know Certificates are authorized and not added by malware?
There are a lot of certificates on my computer, some from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other countries. Do you have a list of Certificates that I should have on my computer.
All Replies (2)
The certs stored in Windows are for a lot more than websites, they are for anything requiring digital signing. These will largely be for software and drivers (so you can install them). Mozilla will not know which of these are valid, but Windows doesn't keep untrusted or expired certificates.
If your machine belonged to a corporate network, you might have a lot of certs which are now pointless.
See, for example, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/install/digital-certificates and related entries.
Certificates from the web just allow you to make a secure (HTTPS) connection to a site.
Firefox comes with builtin root trusted certificates that are used to build a certificate chain with the certificate send by the server and that ends up to a builtin root certificate. Firefox also caches intermediate certificates (software security device) send by the server for future use, these also can be used in case the server doesn't send all required intermediate certificates (you would otherwise get a SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER error).