en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter
1 correction found
Mozilla Firefox uses cascading Bloom filters for Certificate Revocation and for blocking malicious addons.
This is outdated for certificate revocation. Mozilla says Firefox’s current CRLite revocation system no longer uses Bloom-filter cascades; it now uses a Clubcard/Ribbon-filter design, and Firefox 137 removed support for the legacy Bloom-filter format.
Full reasoning
Mozilla’s own current documentation contradicts the article’s present-tense wording for certificate revocation.
- In August 2025, Mozilla Hacks explained that the original CRLite design used “multi-level cascades of Bloom filters,” but that current Clubcard-based CRLite uses a “partitioned two-level cascade of Ribbon filters.”
- Mozilla also states in Bug 1949027 that Firefox was “moving forward with clubcard filters” and that it did not plan to publish bloom filter cascades in the future. That bug, titled “Remove support for bloom filter cascade based CRLite filters,” was fixed for Firefox 137.
So while Firefox did use Bloom-filter cascades in earlier CRLite work, the statement as written is no longer accurate in the present tense: Firefox’s current certificate-revocation mechanism is not using cascading Bloom filters anymore.
The add-ons half of the sentence appears to be historically accurate: Mozilla’s add-ons blog says the Firefox 79 blocklist revamp was powered by cascading Bloom filters. But because the sentence joins both claims with “and” and states them in the present tense, the whole sentence is misleading as written.
3 sources
- CRLite: Fast, private, and comprehensive certificate revocation checking in Firefox - Mozilla Hacks
Where the original CRLite design used a “multi-level cascades of Bloom filters”, Clubcard-based CRLite uses a “partitioned two-level cascade of Ribbon filters”.
- Bug 1949027 - Remove support for bloom filter cascade based CRLite filters
We are moving forward with clubcard filters, and we do not plan to publish bloom filter cascades in the future.
- Introducing a scalable add-ons blocklist - Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
After investigating potential solutions, we decided the new add-ons blocklist would be powered by a data structure created from cascading bloom filters.