Experiences deploying multi-vantage-point domain validation at let's encrypt

Henry Birge-Lee, Liang Wang, Daniel McCarney, Roland Shoemaker, Jennifer Rexford, Prateek Mittal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

An attacker can obtain a valid TLS certificate for a domain by hijacking communication between a certificate authority (CA) and a victim domain. Performing domain validation from multiple vantage points can defend against these attacks. We explore the design space of multi-vantage-point domain validation to achieve (1) security via sufficiently diverse vantage points, (2) performance by ensuring low latency and overhead in certificate issuance, (3) manageability by complying with CA/Browser forum requirements, and requiring minimal changes to CA operations, and (4) a low benign failure rate for legitimate requests. Our open-source implementation was deployed by the Let's Encrypt CA in February 2020, and has since secured the issuance of more than half a billion certificates during the first year of its deployment. Using real-world operational data from Let's Encrypt, we show that our approach has negligible latency and communication overhead, and a benign failure rate comparable to conventional designs with one vantage point. Finally, we evaluate the security improvements using a combination of ethically conducted real-world BGP hijacks, Internet-scale traceroute experiments, and a novel BGP simulation framework. We show that multi-vantage-point domain validation can thwart the vast majority of BGP attacks. Our work motivates the deployment of multi-vantage-point domain validation across the CA ecosystem to strengthen TLS certificate issuance and user privacy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages4311-4327
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9781939133243
StatePublished - 2021
Event30th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Aug 11 2021Aug 13 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium

Conference

Conference30th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period8/11/218/13/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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