Recently, a flaw was discovered in the version of OpenSSL shipped with certain Debian and Ubuntu systems, such that they generated only a very limited number of different, and predictable, keys. This has the potential to affect both SSH and SSL keys.

It would therefore be rather a big problem if any root certificates in our root store were generated on systems with weak RNGs – because attackers could then forge certificates for any website, and Firefox would trust them. Fortunately, we have ascertained that this is not the case.

We are continuing to investigate other ways that this problem may impact Firefox and the secure web, and what can be done about it.