Postcertificates for Revocation Transparency

TL;DR

The paper introduces a practical revocation transparency protocol using postcertificates and existing Certificate Transparency logs, enhancing trust, accountability, and control in certificate revocation processes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel revocation transparency protocol leveraging postcertificates and CT logs, enabling autonomous revocation and improved CA accountability.

Findings

Protocol is practical and low-cost to deploy.

Provides immutable revocation history and transparency.

Enables certificate owners to control revocation independently.

Abstract

The modern Internet is highly dependent on trust communicated via certificates. However, in some cases, certificates become untrusted, and it is necessary to revoke them. In practice, the problem of secure revocation is still open. Furthermore, the existing procedures do not leave a transparent and immutable revocation history. We propose and evaluate a new revocation transparency protocol that introduces postcertificates and utilizes the existing Certificate Transparency (CT) logs. The protocol is practical, has a low deployment cost, provides an immutable history of revocations, enables delegation, and helps to detect revocation-related misbehavior by certificate authorities (CAs). With this protocol, a holder of a postcertificate can bypass the issuing CA and autonomously initiate the revocation process via submission of the postcertificate to a CT log. The CAs are required to monitor CT logs and proceed with the revocation upon detection of a postcertificate. Revocation status delivery is performed independently and with an arbitrary status protocol. Postcertificates can increase the accountability of the CAs and empower the certificate owners by giving them additional control over the status of the certificates. We evaluate the protocol, measure log and monitor performance, and conclude that it is possible to provide revocation transparency using existing CT logs.