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The Inconvenient Truth About Web Certificates

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Economics of Information Security and Privacy III

Abstract

HTTPS is the de facto standard for securing Internet communications. Although it is widely deployed, the security provided with HTTPS in practice is dubious. HTTPS may fail to provide security for multiple reasons, mostly due to certificate-based authentication failures. Given the importance of HTTPS, we investigate the current scale and practices of HTTPS and certificate-based deployment. We provide a large-scale empirical analysis that considers the top one million most popular websites. Our results show that very few websites implement certificate-based authentication properly. In most cases, domain mismatches between certificates and websites are observed. We study the economic, legal and social aspects of the problem. We identify causes and implications of the profit-oriented attitude of CAs and show how the current economic model leads to the distribution of cheap certificates for cheap security. Finally, we suggest possible changes to improve certificate-based authentication.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The legitimate domain is bankofamerica.com.

  2. 2.

    E-banking URL of ubs.com: https://ebanking1.ubs.com/en/OGJNCMHIFJJEIBAKJBDHLMBJFELALLHGKIJDACFGIEDK HLBJCBPLHMOOKDAHFFKONKKKAMPMNAEDFPCIOENKBGNEGNBDKJNN6Aes21WHTRFkGdlzvKKjjyZeB+GNeAGf-jzjgiO2LFw

  3. 3.

    To illustrate how Alexa sorts websites into categories, we provide the list of top five websites per category in Appendix.

  4. 4.

    A wildcard “*” stands for at most one level of subdomain, i.e. *.domain.tld matches subdomain.domain.tld but not subsubdomain.subdomain.domain.tld.

  5. 5.

    Expiration periods are computed with respect to February 2010.

  6. 6.

    Even though some CAs (e.g., Equifax and Thawte) were acquired by VeriSign, we refer to them as separate CAs as they offer different products and services and have different policies.

References

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jens Grossklags for his valuable insights and feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Nevena Vratonjic, Julien Freudiger, Vincent Bindschaedler & Jean-Pierre Hubaux

Authors
  1. Nevena Vratonjic
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  2. Julien Freudiger
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  3. Vincent Bindschaedler
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  4. Jean-Pierre Hubaux
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nevena Vratonjic .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Bruce Schneier

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Vratonjic, N., Freudiger, J., Bindschaedler, V., Hubaux, JP. (2013). The Inconvenient Truth About Web Certificates. In: Schneier, B. (eds) Economics of Information Security and Privacy III. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1981-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1981-5_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-1980-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-1981-5

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