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If you are moving through News feed on an old Android phone, it’s time to upgrade. One of the most important certification bodies in the world warns that phones running versions of Android prior to 7.1.1 Nougat will be cut off from large parts of the secure web starting in 2021. Android Police I mentioned Saturday.

The non-profit organization with Mozilla Let’s Encrypt She said her partnership with the associate certification body IdenTrust will expire in September. 1, 2021. Since there are no plans to renew the co-signing agreement, Let’s Encrypt plans to discontinue the default signing of the IdenTrust root certificate, DST Root X3, starting January 11th as the organization moves to using only its ISRG Root X1.

It’s a very important shift given that As much as a third All web domains are based on enterprise certifications. But since outdated programs won’t trust Let’s Encrypt’s root certificate, this could “cause some compatibility issues,” says lead developer Jacob Hoffman Andrews in Blog post Friday.

He said, “Some programs that haven’t been updated since 2016 (roughly when our root was accepted for many root programs) still don’t trust our root certificate, ISRG Root X1.” “In particular, this includes Android versions prior to 7.1.1. This means that those older versions of Android will no longer trust the certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.”

The only solution for these users is to install Firefox since it relies on its own certificate store which includes Let’s Encrypt root, although that won’t prevent apps from jailbreaking or guarantee functionality outside of your browser.

Let’s Encrypt noted that approximately 34% of Android devices are running a version older than 7.1 based on data from Google’s Android Development Kit. This translates into millions of users potentially being cut off from large parts of the safe web starting in 2021. In short, if you are looking for any New phones This holiday season, it can be worth the waste to save yourself a headache later.

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