Certificate Validation Through Public Ledgers and Blockchains.

Abstract

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are of crucial importance for the life of online services relying on certificate-based authentication, like e-commerce, e-government, online banking, as well as e-mail, social networking, cloud services and many others. One of the main points of failure (POFs) of modern PKIs concerns reliability and security of certificate revocation lists (CRLs), that must be available and authentic any time a certificate is used. Classically, the CRL for a set of certificates is maintained by the same (and sole) certification authority (CA) that issued the certificates, and this introduces a single POF in the system. We address this issue by proposing a solution in which multiple CAs share a public, decentralized and robust ledger where CRLs are collected. For this purpose, we consider the model of public ledgers based on blockchains, introduced for the use in cryptocurrencies, that is becoming a widespread solution for many online applications with stringent security and reliability requirements.