As I mentioned in my previous post, we protect from compromised CA’s by using a nothing-up-my-sleeve (NUMS) HPKP pin in Chromium. Previously, it was necessary for the user to add this pin themselves in the Chromium UI. This was really sketchy from both a security and UX point of view. I have now submitted a PR to ncdns that will automatically add the necessary pin.

This is implemented as a standalone program that is intended to be run at install. It works by parsing Chromium’s TransportSecurity storage file (which is just JSON), adding an entry for bit that contains the NUMS key pin, and then saving the result as JSON back to TransportSecurity .

I expect this to work for most browsers based on Chromium (e.g. Chrome and Opera), on most OS’s (e.g. GNU/Linux, Windows, and macOS), but so far I’ve only tested with Chrome on Windows. I don’t expect it to work with Electron-based applications such as Riot and Brave; Electron doesn’t seem to follow the standard Chromium conventions on HPKP. I haven’t yet examined Electron to see if there’s a way we can get it to work.

This isn’t yet integrated with the NSIS installer; I’ll be asking Hugo to take a look at doing the integration there.