Design of the CRLite Infrastructure

Published 2020-12-01

Firefox is the only major browser that still evaluates every website it connects to whether the certificate used has been reported as revoked. Firefox users are notified of all connections involving untrustworthy certificates, regardless the popularity of the site. Inconveniently, checking certificate status sometimes slows down the connection to websites.... [read more]

Auditing the CRLs in CRLite

Published 2020-11-27

Since Firefox Nightly is now using CRLite to determine if enrolled websites’ certificates are revoked, it’s useful to dig into the data to answer why a given certificate issuer gets enrolled or not.

Ultimately this is a matter of whether the CRLs for a given issuer are available to... [read more]

Querying CRLite for WebPKI Revocations

Published 2020-11-26

Firefox Nightly is now using CRLite to determine if websites’ certificates are revoked — e.g., if the Certificate Authority published that web browsers shouldn’t trust that website certificate. Telemetry shows that querying the local CRLite dataset is much faster than making a network connection for OCSP, which makes... [read more]

CRLite: Speeding Up Secure Browsing

Published 2020-01-21

CRLite pushes bulk certificate revocation information to Firefox users, reducing the need to actively query such information one by one. Additionally this new technology eliminates the privacy leak that individual queries can bring, and does so for the whole Web, not just special parts of it.

The End-to-End Design of CRLite

Published 2020-01-09

CRLite is a technology to efficiently compress revocation information for the whole Web PKI into a format easily delivered to Web users. It addresses the performance and privacy pitfalls of the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) while avoiding a need for some administrative decisions on the relative value of one... [read more]

Introducing CRLite: All of the Web PKI’s revocations, compressed

Published 2020-01-09

CRLite is a technology proposed by a group of researchers at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2017 that compresses revocation information so effectively that 300 megabytes of revocation data can become 1 megabyte.

Making HTTPS Revocations Work: CRLite (Lightning Talk)

Published 2018-12-04

I gave a lightning talk at our Mozilla All-Hands meeting about CRLite, a new technology for delivering revocations for the Web PKI to all clients in a very compressed form.

Countering Phishing with Cryptography - WebAuthn (Lightning Talk)

Published 2017-12-04

At Mozilla’s Austin All-Hands I gave a lightning talk about Web Authentication, which is our best technical solution to the scourge of phishing today.