Empirical analysis of certificate revocation lists

• Main Authors: WALLECK, Daryl, LI, Yingjiu, Xu, Shouhuai
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2008
• Subjects: public key infrastructure; certificate revocation; empirical analysis; Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/421; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/1420/viewcontent/empirical_analysis_of_certificate_revocation_lists.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Managing public key certificates revocation has long been a central issue in public key infrastructures. Though various certificate revocation mechanisms have been proposed to address this issue, little effort has been devoted to the empirical analysis of real-world certificate revocation data. In this paper, we conduct such an empirical analysis based on a large amount of data collected from VeriSign. Our study enables us to understand how long a revoked certificate lives and what the difference is in the lifetime of revoked certificates by certificate types, geographic locations, and organizations. Our study also provides a solid foundation for future research on optimal management of certificate revocation for different types of certificates requested from different organizations and located in different geographic locations.