[Infowarrior] - Paper: The SSL Landscape – A Thorough Analysis of the X.509 PKI Using Active and Passive Measurements

[Richard Forno]

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 Faculty of Informatics Chair for Network Architectures and Services {holz,braun,kammenhuber,carle}@net.in.tum.de

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 con- ducted 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 certifi- cates 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, in- cluding 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 10 Gbps 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 strin- gency, due to a number of reasons among which invalid certifica- tion 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 de- ployed X.509 PKI. Our findings confirm what has long been be- lieved – namely that the X.509 PKI that we use so often in our everyday’s lives is in a sorry state

http://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/papers/imc-pkicrawl-2.pdf

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