Does Certificate Transparency Break the Web? Measuring Adoption and Error Rate

Stark, Emily; Sleevi, Ryan; Muminovic, Rijad; O’Brien, Devon; Messeri, Eran; Felt, Adrienne Porter; McMillion, Brendan; Tabriz, Parisa

doi:10.1109/sp.2019.00027

Cited by 42 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…They notably show that HTTPS websites are more inclined to implement web security policies. Stark et al [43] study the adoption of the certi cate transparency (CT), which xes several structural aws in the TLS certi cate system and measure the error rates users experience. They show that CT has been widely adopted with minimal amount of warning displayed to the users.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study of the Use of Integrity Verification Mechanisms for Web Subresources

Chapuis¹,

Omolola²,

Cherubini³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

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Web developers can (and do) include subresources such as scripts, stylesheets and images in their webpages. Such subresources might be stored on content delivery networks (CDNs). This practice creates security and privacy risks, should a subresource be corrupted. The subresource integrity (SRI) recommendation, released in mid-2016 by the W3C, enables developers to include digests in their webpages in order for web browsers to verify the integrity of subresources before loading them. In this paper, we conduct the rst large-scale longitudinal study of the use of SRI on the Web by analyzing massive crawls (≈3B URLs) of the Web over the last 3.5 years. Our results show that the adoption of SRI is modest (≈3.40%), but grows at an increasing rate and is highly in uenced by the practices of popular library developers (e.g., Bootstrap) and CDN operators (e.g., jsDelivr). We complement our analysis about SRI with a survey of web developers (=227): It shows that a substantial proportion of developers know SRI and understand its basic functioning, but most of them ignore important aspects of the recommendation. The results of the survey also show that the integration of SRI by developers is mostly manual-hence not scalable and error prone. This calls for a better integration of SRI in build tools. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Web protocol security; Hash functions and message authentication codes.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study of the Use of Integrity Verification Mechanisms for Web Subresources

Chapuis¹,

Omolola²,

Cherubini³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Today, commercial CAs have less freedom than before, and their certificate issuing processes are regulated by a set of standards issued by the CA/Browser forum [13,16]. One of the important newer mechanisms for monitoring a CA's performance is Certificate Transparency (CT), which was introduced by Google in 2012 [12,17]. This system was conceived as a result of several attacks against the TLS ecosystem, including the issuing of fraudulent Google certificates.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Validation of Web X.509 Certificates by TLS Interception Products

Wazan

Laborde²,

Chadwick

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Dependable and Secure Comput.

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The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol aims to provide confidentiality and integrity of data. It is based on X.509 Certificates. Our previous research showed that popular Web Browsers exhibit non-standardized behaviour with respect to the certificate validation process [1]. This paper extends that work by examining their handling of OCSP Stapling. We also examine several popular HTTPS interception products, including proxies and anti-virus tools, regarding their certificate validation processes. We analyse and compare their behaviour to that described in the relative standards.

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“…Summary. As browsers, like Chrome and Safari, enforced the inclusion of web certificates in CT-logs, CAs increasingly implemented CT-log inclusion policies [38], [6]. Therefore, approximately all of the valid certificates in both ecosystems have been logged.…”

Section: Inclusion In Certificate Transparency Logsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparative Analysis of DoT and HTTPS Certificate Ecosystems

Jahromi¹,

Abdou²

2021

Proceedings 2021 Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web

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Systemd-resolved", among others, have implemented DoT stub-resolvers [16]. As a result, DoT queries have increased over the Internet since 2018 [27]. Similar to securing web (HTTPS) and email (S/MIME), DoT in the Internet relies on the Internet's Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and associated Certification Authorities (CAs) for signing and delivering resolvers' standard X.509 certificates.On security, we investigate whether DoT would be susceptible to classic (or historic) PKI shortcomings, such as invalid/self-signed certificates, weak cryptographic parameters, or fraudulent certificates issued by compromised CAs. Over time, browsers enhanced HTTPS security by stringent certificate validation and indispensable demand of security features, like the placement of certificates in Certificate Transparency (CT) logs [38], [6]; CAs have accordingly been steppingup their issuance standards. It is unclear how many of the browser-implemented reinforcements for HTTPS are adopted in DoT, and how the relatively lax security in DoT affects issued certificates. For example, successful authentication [4] and encryption are unnecessary in DoT depending on the client's configured usage profile (see opportunistic mode in RFC 7858 [42]).We present results upon comparing a random sample of DoT and HTTPS certificates collected from Rapid7 [32]. Particularly, this paper contributes results upon comparing DoT and HTTPS certificates for the following aspects: Distribution and characteristics of certificate issuers (Sec. IV). Certificate parameters, including validity windows and cipher-suites (Sec. V). Proportion and distribution of certificates in CT-logs (Sec. VI).Our results highlight non-major differences between both ecosystems, including differences in: the dominant CA, certificate validity, and cryptographic properties. The proportion of invalid certificates appears almost similar in both ecosystems, likewise the expiry windows and cryptographic functions. We also found almost equivalent rates of CT-log inclusion in both ecosystems. These results suggest that so far, the deployment and usage of DoT certificates in practice appears promising, and not significantly affected by the lack of strict security checks in sub-resolvers.

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Does Certificate Transparency Break the Web? Measuring Adoption and Error Rate

Cited by 42 publications

References 26 publications

An Empirical Study of the Use of Integrity Verification Mechanisms for Web Subresources

An Empirical Study of the Use of Integrity Verification Mechanisms for Web Subresources

On the Validation of Web X.509 Certificates by TLS Interception Products

Comparative Analysis of DoT and HTTPS Certificate Ecosystems

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