Practical Issues with TLS Client Certificate Authentication
Abstract
The most widely used secure Internet communication standard TLS (Transport Layer Security) has an optional client certificate authentication feature that in theory has significant security advantages over HTML form-based password authentication.In this paper we discuss practical security and usability issues related to TLS client certificate authentication stemming from the server-side and browser implementations.In particular, we analyze Apache's mod_ssl implementation on the server side and the most popular browsers -Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer on the client side.We complement our paper with a measurement study performed in Estonia where TLS client certificate authentication is widely used.We present our recommendations to improve the security and usability of TLS client certificate authentication.
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Laurie, B., Langley, A., & Kasper, E. (2013) · doi:10.17487/rfc6962 · Cited by 378 · see citing works
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Brubaker, C., Jana, S., Ray, B., Khurshid, S., & Shmatikov, V. (2014) · 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy · doi:10.1109/sp.2014.15 · Cited by 218 · see citing works
Ghorbani Lyastani, S., Schilling, M., Neumayr, M., Backes, M., & Bugiel, S. (2020) · 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · doi:10.1109/sp40000.2020.00047 · Cited by 108 · see citing works
- Authors
- Parsovs, A.
- Venue
- Proceedings 2014 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
- Publisher
- Internet Society
- Published
- 2014
- OpenAlex
- W1987283229
- Cited by
- 33
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 3
- FWCI
- 2.60
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- European Regional Development Fund
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › User Authentication and Security Systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web Application Security Vulnerabilities
- Keywords
- TLS, Transport Layer Security, Apache, browser security, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, usability, security recommendations, Estonia
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