Categories: Security

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

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. It accomplishes this by combining Certificate Transparency data and Internet scan results with cascading Bloom filters, building a data structure that is reliable, easy to verify, and easy to update.

Since December, Firefox Nightly has been shipping with with CRLite, collecting telemetry on its effectiveness and speed. As can be imagined, replacing a network round-trip with local lookups makes for a substantial performance improvement. Mozilla currently updates the CRLite dataset four times per day, although not all updates are currently delivered to clients.

Revocations on the Web PKI: Past and Present

The design of the Web’s Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) included the idea that website certificates would be revocable to indicate that they are no longer safe to trust: perhaps because the server they were used on was being decommissioned, or there had been a security incident. In practice, this has been more of an aspiration, as the imagined mechanisms showed their shortcomings:

  • Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) quickly became large, and contained mostly irrelevant data, so web browsers didn’t download them;
  • The Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) was unreliable, and so web browsers had to assume if it didn’t work that the website was still valid.

Since revocation is still crucial for protecting users, browsers built administratively-managed, centralized revocation lists: Firefox’s OneCRL, combined with Safe Browsing’s URL-specific warnings, provide the tools needed to handle major security incidents, but opinions differ on what to do about finer-grained revocation needs and the role of OCSP.

The Unreliability of Online Status Checks

Much has been written on the subject of OCSP reliability, and while reliability has definitely improved in recent years (per Firefox telemetry; failure rate), it still suffers under less-than-perfect network conditions: even among our Beta population, which historically has above-average connectivity, over 7% of OCSP checks time out today.

Because of this, it’s impractical to require OCSP to succeed for a connection to be secure, and in turn, an adversarial monster-in-the-middle (MITM) can simply block OCSP to achieve their ends. For more on this, a couple of classic articles are:

Mozilla has been making improvements in this realm for some time, implementing OCSP Must-Staple, which was designed as a solution to this problem, while continuing to use online status checks whenever there’s no stapled response.

We’ve also made Firefox skip revocation information for short-lived certificates; however, despite improvements in automation, such short-lived certificates still make up a very small portion of the Web PKI, because the majority of certificates are long-lived.

Does Decentralized Revocation Bring Dangers?

The ideal in question is whether a Certificate Authority’s (CA) revocation should be directly relied upon by end-users.

There are legitimate concerns that respecting CA revocations could be a path to enabling CAs to censor websites. This would be particularly troubling in the event of increased consolidation in the CA market. However, at present, if one CA were to engage in censorship, the website operator could go to a different CA.

If censorship concerns do bear out, then Mozilla has the option to use its root store policy to influence the situation in accordance with our manifesto.

Does Decentralized Revocation Bring Value?

Legitimate revocations are either done by the issuing CA because of a security incident or policy violation, or they are done on behalf of the certificate’s owner, for their own purposes. The intention becomes codified to render the certificate unusable, perhaps due to key compromise or service provider change, or as was done in the wake of Heartbleed.

Choosing specific revocations to honor and refusing others dismisses the intentions of all left-behind revocations attempts. For Mozilla, it violates principle 6 of our manifesto, limiting participation in the Web PKI’s security model.

There is a cost to supporting all revocations – checking OCSP:

  1. Slows down our first connection by ~130 milliseconds (CERT_VALIDATION_HTTP_REQUEST_SUCCEEDED_TIME, https://mzl.la/2ogT8TJ),
  2. Fails unsafe, if an adversary is in control of the web connection, and
  3. Periodically reveals to the CA the HTTPS web host that a user is visiting.

Luckily, CRLite gives us the ability to deliver all the revocation knowledge needed to replace OCSP, and do so quickly, compactly, and accurately.

Can CRLite Replace OCSP?

Firefox Nightly users are currently only using CRLite for telemetry, but by changing the preference security.pki.crlite_mode to 2, CRLite can enter “enforcing” mode and respect CRLite revocations for eligible websites. There’s not yet a mode to disable OCSP; there’ll be more on that in subsequent posts.

This blog post is the first in a series discussing the technology for CRLite, the observed effects, and the nature of a collaboration of this magnitude between industry and academia. The next post discusses the end-to-end design of the CRLite mechanism, and why it works. Additionally, some FAQs about CRLite are available on Github.