Title
Temporal Analysis of X.509 Revocations and their Statuses
Abstract
Despite the X.509 public key infrastructure (PKI) being essential for ensuring the trust we place in our communication with web servers, the revocation of the trust placed in individual X.509 certificates is neither transparent nor well-studied, leaving many unanswered questions. In this paper, we present a temporal analysis of 36 million certificates, whose revocation statuses we followed for 120 days since first being issued. We characterize the revocation rates of different certificate authorities (CAs) and how the rates change over the lifetime of the certificates. We identify and discuss several instances where the status changes from “revoked” to “good”, “unauthorized” or “unknown”, respectively, before the certificate's expiry. This complements prior work that has observed such inconsistencies in some CAs' behavior after expiry but also highlight a potentially more severe problem. Our results highlight heterogeneous revocation practices among the CAs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/EuroSPW55150.2022.00032
2022 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
Revocations, X.509 certificates, OCSP
Conference
2768-0649
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-6654-9561-5
0
0.34
References 
Authors
22
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Adam Halim100.34
Max Danielsson200.34
Martin Arlitt300.34
Niklas Carlsson401.69