20101014: VeriSign troubleshoots a UTF8 issue

VeriSign, Thawte and Geotrust non-EV products, ordered from July 15th to October 10th, 2010 have been issued with a UTF8-encoded subject.

Even though is is perfectly compliant with standards, it was a mistake because the rule is to only encode in UTF8STRING fields that contain characters not included in standard sets (PRINTABLESTRING and T61STRING).

This passed unnoticed during several weeks until one of our customers encountered an issue with a UTF8-non-compatible equipment. We informed VeriSign that immediately took action and solved the problem in a matter of days.

The impact of that bug is quite restraint for the certificates are not recognized by Internet Explorer under Windows 95 and 98... that do not interpret UTF8.

If you have one of those certificates, you can request a free reissue to get a certificate with a conventional encoding!