TY - GEN
T1 - Mission accomplished? HTTPS security after diginotar
AU - Amann, Johanna
AU - Gasser, Oliver
AU - Scheitle, Quirin
AU - Brent, Lexi
AU - Carle, Georg
AU - Holz, Ralph
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2017/11/1
Y1 - 2017/11/1
N2 - Driven by CA compromises and the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks, new security features have been added to TLS, HTTPS, and the web PKI over the past five years. These include Certificate Transparency (CT), for making the CA system auditable; HSTS and HPKP headers, to harden the HTTPS posture of a domain; the DNS-based extensions CAA and TLSA, for control over certificate issuance and pinning; and SCSV, for protocol downgrade protection. This paper presents the first large scale investigation of these improvements to the HTTPS ecosystem, explicitly accounting for their combined usage. In addition to collecting passive measurements at the Internet uplinks of large University networks on three continents, we perform the largest domain-based active Internet scan to date, covering 193M domains. Furthermore, we track the long-term deployment history of new TLS security features by leveraging passive observations dating back to 2012. We find that while deployment of new security features has picked up in general, only SCSV (49M domains) and CT (7M domains) have gained enough momentum to improve the overall security of HTTPS. Features with higher complexity, such as HPKP, are deployed scarcely and often incorrectly. Our empirical findings are placed in the context of risk, deployment effort, and benefit of these new technologies, and actionable steps for improvement are proposed. We cross-correlate use of features and find some techniques with significant correlation in deployment. We support reproducible research and publicly release data and code.
AB - Driven by CA compromises and the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks, new security features have been added to TLS, HTTPS, and the web PKI over the past five years. These include Certificate Transparency (CT), for making the CA system auditable; HSTS and HPKP headers, to harden the HTTPS posture of a domain; the DNS-based extensions CAA and TLSA, for control over certificate issuance and pinning; and SCSV, for protocol downgrade protection. This paper presents the first large scale investigation of these improvements to the HTTPS ecosystem, explicitly accounting for their combined usage. In addition to collecting passive measurements at the Internet uplinks of large University networks on three continents, we perform the largest domain-based active Internet scan to date, covering 193M domains. Furthermore, we track the long-term deployment history of new TLS security features by leveraging passive observations dating back to 2012. We find that while deployment of new security features has picked up in general, only SCSV (49M domains) and CT (7M domains) have gained enough momentum to improve the overall security of HTTPS. Features with higher complexity, such as HPKP, are deployed scarcely and often incorrectly. Our empirical findings are placed in the context of risk, deployment effort, and benefit of these new technologies, and actionable steps for improvement are proposed. We cross-correlate use of features and find some techniques with significant correlation in deployment. We support reproducible research and publicly release data and code.
KW - CAA
KW - CT
KW - HPKP
KW - HSTS
KW - HTTPS
KW - PKI
KW - SCSV
KW - TLS
KW - X.509
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85038617911
U2 - 10.1145/3131365.3131401
DO - 10.1145/3131365.3131401
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85038617911
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 325
EP - 340
BT - IMC 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2017 ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2017
Y2 - 1 November 2017 through 3 November 2017
ER -