Customers visiting an Xbox Live billing site with Firefox are liable to get a false warning that Microsoft's digital certificate is "invalid". The certificate is fine and IE users are unaffected by the glitch, which represents the reappearance of an intermittent bug limited to gamers who use Mozilla's open source browser. Reg reader Gordon, who gave us the heads up about the snafu, explained that he came across it in the process of trying to cancel his X-Box Live Gold account. After firing up Firefox, he was greeted by a confusing and unhelpful error message (extract below). You have asked Firefox to connect securely to billing.microsoft.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure… billing.microsoft.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. Chris Boyd, a security consultant at Sunbelt and Microsoft MVP who has studied the security of online gaming in some depth, confirmed the glitch. "It seems you get a cert error in Firefox 3.6.8 (the latest version), I don't have other versions to hand to try out," Boyd told El Reg. "[It] Works in IE, and the cert is viewable." The latest problem appears to be a repeat of earlier glitches, such as one two years ago that affected "Firefox 3", he said. Reports of the problem from August 2008 can be found on gaming forums here. The bug reappeared last month, according to a notice on a Mozilla support forum. "There are a few other examples of this on the web, but nobody seems to have a definite answer," Boyd added. We've passed on the details of the problem to Microsoft's Xbox team and will update this story when we hear more. ®
