The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is proposing an extension to the current SSL chain of trust that aims to improve the security of HTTPS and other secure communication protocols.

GlobalSign expects to bring its certificate-issuing systems back online on Monday, and resume business Tuesday, it said over the weekend. The U.S. certificate authority (CA) stopped issuing new SSL certificates last Tuesday in order to audit its security, after being named as a target by the hacker who claimed to have attacked Dutch CA DigiNotar.

Iranian internet users whose security may have been compromised by the forged Google.com digital certificate could number in the hundreds of thousands. An interim report (PDF) commissioned by DigiNotar, the certification authority (CA) at the centre of the hacking incident, also reveals lax security at the Dutch firm.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has made good on its promise to support Linux in its next-generation authentication software, dubbed AUSkey, with the reference distribution being Ubuntu with the Firefox Web browser.

National Linux advocacy body Linux Australia has added its support for the federal government's Standard Business Reporting initiative by planning an open source SBR integration project, meanwhile work begins at the ATO on AUSkey for Linux.