Certificate Transparency Fix

Electron 1.4.12 contains an important patch that fixes an upstream Chrome issue where some Symantec, GeoTrust, and Thawte SSL/TLS certificates are incorrectly rejected 10 weeks from the build time of libchromiumcontent, Electron’s underlying Chrome library. There are no issues with the certificates used on the affected sites and replacing these certificates will not help.

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In Electron 1.4.0 — 1.4.11 HTTPS requests to sites using these affected certificates will fail with network errors after a certain date. This affects HTTPS requests made using Chrome’s underlying networking APIs such as window.fetch, Ajax requests, Electron’s net API, BrowserWindow.loadURL, webContents.loadURL, the src attribute on a <webview> tag, and others.

Upgrading your applications to 1.4.12 will prevent these request failures from occurring.

Note: This issue was introduced in Chrome 53 so Electron versions earlier than 1.4.0 are not affected.

Impact Dates

Below is a table of each Electron 1.4 version and the date when requests to sites using these affected certificates will start to fail.

Electron Version	Impact Date
1.3.x	Unaffected
1.4.0	Already failing
1.4.1	Already failing
1.4.2	Already failing
1.4.3	December 10th, 2016 9:00 PM PST
1.4.4	December 10th, 2016 9:00 PM PST
1.4.5	December 10th, 2016 9:00 PM PST
1.4.6	January 14th, 2017 9:00 PM PST
1.4.7	January 14th, 2017 9:00 PM PST
1.4.8	January 14th, 2017 9:00 PM PST
1.4.9	January 14th, 2017 9:00 PM PST
1.4.10	January 14th, 2017 9:00 PM PST
1.4.11	February 11th, 2017 9:00 PM PST
1.4.12	Unaffected

You can verify your app’s impact date by setting your computer’s clock ahead and then check to see if https://symbeta.symantec.com/welcome/ successfully loads from it.

More Information

You can read more about this topic, the original issue, and the fix at the following places:

• What is Certificate Transparency?
• Symtantec knowledge base article
• Chrome issue 664177
• Chrome fix for issue 664177
• libchromiumcontent patch for issue 664177