First published: 29th January 2019
A key event in the Hongkong Post Certification Authority Root CA Rollover Plan will take place on 1st February 2019; e-Certs for most categories will then be issued under Root CA2. e-Certs for Government B/Ds and users of certain e-Government services will have a later changeover date of 1st April 2019. e-Cert (Server) certificates will not change until 1st July 2019, and will then be issued under Root CA3.
One of the Government services that will not be transitioning to Root CA2 on 1st February is the Trade and Industry Department's (TID) E-application System for Strategic Commodities Licensing (E-SC). In an email message on their Strategic Commodities Control System Website Update Notice mailing list, the TID advised:
During the transition, E-SC users, who will apply for / renew e-Cert in the coming few months, should indicate their intended use of the e-Cert to HKPCA, so as to facilitate HKPCA to issue appropriate version of e-Cert (i.e. under root certificate “Hongkong Post Root CA 1”), which is accepted by E-SC both before and after the system modification.
Users of the Mozilla Firefox browser should note that the root certificate Root CA3, which will be used for e-Cert (Server) certificates after 1st July 2019, is currently in a 3 week comment period in the process of being accepted for inclusion with the browser.
This transition should be transparent to end users.