August 21, 2019

Protecting Chrome users in Kazakhstan



When making secure connections, Chrome trusts certificates that have been locally installed on a user's computer or mobile device. This allows users to run tools to inspect and debug connections during website development, or for corporate environments to intercept and monitor internal traffic. It is not appropriate for this mechanism to be used to intercept traffic on the public internet.

In response to recent actions by the Kazakhstan government, Chrome, along with other browsers, has taken steps to protect users from the interception or modification of TLS connections made to websites.

Chrome will be blocking the certificate the Kazakhstan government required users to install:

Common Name
Qaznet Trust Network
SHA-256 Fingerprint
00:30:9C:73:6D:D6:61:DA:6F:1E:B2:41:73:AA:84:99:44:C1:68:A4:3A:15:
BF:FD:19:2E:EC:FD:B6:F8:DB:D2
SHA-256 of Subject Public Key Info
B5:BA:8D:D7:F8:95:64:C2:88:9D:3D:64:53:C8:49:98:C7:78:24:91:9B:64:
EA:08:35:AA:62:98:65:91:BE:50


The certificate has been added to CRLSet. No action is needed by users to be protected. In addition, the certificate has been added to a blocklist in the Chromium source code and thus should be included in other Chromium based browsers in due course.

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