How Certificate Transparency Impact the Performance

Abstract: Security on the Internet is essential to ensure the privacy of an individual. Today, Trans- port Layer Security (TLS) and certificates are used to ensure this. But certificates are not enough in order to maintain confidentiality and therefore a new concept, Certificate Trans- parency (CT), has been introduced. CT improves security by allowing the analysis of sus- picious certificates. Validation by CT uses public logs that can return Signed Certificate Timestamp (SCT), which is a promise returned by the log indicating that the certificate will be added to the log. A server may then deliver the SCT to a client in three different ways: X.509v3 extension, Online Certificate Status Protocol (OSCP) stapling and TLS extension. For further analysis, we have created a tool to collect data during TLS handshakes and data transfer, including byte information, the certificates themselves, SCT delivery method and especially timing information. From our dataset we see that most websites do not use CT and the ones that use CT almost only use X.509 extension to send their SCTs.