Older Android phones won’t support many secure sites in 2021

If you’re losing control of your news feeds on an old Android phone, it might be time to update it. One of the world’s leading certification authorities warns that phones running Android versions prior to 7.1.1 Nougat will be cut off from much of the secure web starting in 2021. Android Police reported Saturday.

Mozilla’s non-profit partner organization Let’s Encrypt has said that its association with the IdenTrust certification authority will expire on February 1, 2021. As it has no plans to renew the cross-signing agreement, Let’s Encrypt plans to stop signing standard cross. for IdenTrust’s root certificate, DST Root X3, starting January 11, as the organization switches exclusively to its own ISRG root. Root X1.

It is a very significant change considering this up to a third all web domains depend on the organization’s certificates. However, because older software doesn’t trust Let’s Encrypt’s root certificate, it can “introduce some compatibility issues,” lead developer Jacob Hoffman-Andrews said in a blog post Friday.

“Some software that hasn’t been updated since 2016 (roughly when our root was accepted by many root programs) still don’t trust our root certificate, ISRG Root X1,” he said. “Specifically, this includes Android versions prior to 7.1.1. This means that older Android versions will no longer rely on certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.”

The only solution for these users would be to install Firefox as it relies on its own certificate store which includes the Let’s Encrypt root, although this does not prevent applications from crashing or grant functionality beyond the browser.

Let’s Encrypt noted that around 34% of Android devices run before 7.1 based on data from Google’s Android development suite. This results in millions of potentially hacked users of much of the protected Web as of 2021. In short, if you’re looking for something new phones During the holiday season, it may be worth spending just to avoid the headache later on.