Ubuntu – Add certificate authorities system-wide on Firefox

certificatesfirefox

I want to add some root CAs that doesn't come with the default firefox on Ubuntu, but I don't know how.

I tried adding them to the local certificates with certutil, but it didn't work. It messed up my certificates database.

$ certutil -A -d .mozilla/firefox/kek3dogy.default/ -i /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/FNMT_ACRAIZ.crt -n "Certificado Raiz FNMT" -t "TCu,Cuw,Tuw"

and then

$ certutil -L -d .mozilla/firefox/kek3dogy.default/

Certificate Nickname                                         Trust Attributes
                                                             SSL,S/MIME,JAR/XPI

Go Daddy Secure Certification Authority                      ,,   
VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA - G3                       ,,   
VeriSign Class 3 Extended Validation SSL CA                  ,,   
DigiCert High Assurance CA-3                                 ,,   
GlobalSign Domain Validation CA - G2                         ,,   
GeoTrust SSL CA                                              ,,   
StartCom Class 2 Primary Intermediate Server CA              ,,   
Google Internet Authority                                    ,,   
Certificado Raiz FNMT                                        CT,C,c
USERTrust Legacy Secure Server CA                            ,,   
HP Jetdirect 2B0EAD20                                        ,,   
Akamai Subordinate CA 3                                      ,,   
VeriSign, Inc.                                               ,,   
Thawte SGC CA                                                ,,   
VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA - G2                       ,,

The certificate won't show up on Firefox. I tried this several times, even deleting the profile, and it showed up once on the Firefox interface, but completely empty.

Anyways, that's only for a user, and I want to add them system-wide. Is there a system-wide database I can modify? How?

If there is no system-wide database I can modify, I can rely on a X start script (as /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ ones, or a script called by the xdg autostart system on /etc/xdg/autostart/) to modify the user profile at session start, but I need a solution that works. I can't even load certificates on the user profiles from the command line now!

Best Answer

The problem here is that Firefox does not have a 'central' location where it looks for certificates. It just looks into the current profile. That's why modifying /usr/share/ca-certificates or other similar directories won't work with Firefox. This is something that has been requested for years; see issues 620373, 449498 and 454036 (and probably there are many others).

So you are left with just two kind of solutions: either modify each profile, or modify the behaviour of Firefox. I know this is not what you are looking for, but there are no ways because Firefox only looks at users' profiles.

Having said that, the solution I would choose is using hard or symbolic links, specifically I'd go with hardlinks. This solution is surely the easiest and probably the better, though I don't have enough information to judge.

What you have to do is basically removing each cert8.db and key3.db files for each profile and replace them with links to the "most complete" cert8.db and key3.db. If you go with hardlinks, the original cert8.db and key3.db will be indistinguishable from the new ones.

Remember to adjust permissions to fit your needs. Most likely, you will need to chmod a+rw so that everybody will be able to add/remove a certificate. If you want only certain users to be able to add/remove certificates, you can create a group, assign the two databases to that group and give +w permission just to the group.

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