http://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/papers/imc-pkicrawl-2.pdf
The SSL Landscape - A Thorough Analysis of the X.509 PKI Using Active and Passive Measurements Ralph Holz, Lothar Braun, Nils Kammenhuber, Georg Carle Technische Universität München ABSTRACT The SSL and TLS infrastructure used in important protocols like HTTPs and IMAPs is built on an X.509 public key infrastructure (PKI). X.509 certificates are thus used to authenticate services like online banking, shopping, e-mail, etc. However, it always has been felt that the certification processes of this PKI may not be conducted with enough rigor, resulting in a deployment where many certificates do not meet the requirements of a secure PKI. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of X.509 certificates in the wild. To shed more light on the state of the deployed and actually used X.509 PKI, we obtained and evaluated data from many different sources. We conducted HTTPs scans of a large number of popular HTTPs servers over a 1.5-year time span, including scans from nine locations distributed over the globe. To compare certification properties of highly ranked hosts with the global picture, we included a third-party scan of the entire IPv4 space in our analyses. Furthermore, we monitored live SSL/TLS traffic on a 10Gbps uplink of a large research network. This allows us to compare the properties of the deployed PKI with the part of the PKI that is being actively accessed by users. Our analyses reveal that the quality of certification lacks in stringency, due to a number of reasons among which invalid certification chains and certificate subjects give the most cause for concern. Similar concerns can be raised for other properties of certification chains and also for many self-signed certificates used in the deployed X.509 PKI. Our findings confirm what has long been believed – namely that the X.509 PKI that we use so often in our everyday’s lives is in a sorry state. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.2 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Network Protocols— SSL, TLS, X.509; C.2.3 [Computer-Communication Net- works]: Network Operations—SSL, TLS, X.509; E.3 [Data En- cryption]: Public key cryptosystems, Standards, SSL, TLS, X.509; H.4.3 [Information Systems Applications]: Communications Applications— Electronic mail, Information browsers, SSL, TLS General Terms Security, Measurement, Human Factors Keywords SSL, TLS, HTTPS, X.509, Certificates, Public Key Infrastructure _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
