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Langley: Revocation checking and Chrome's CRL

On his blog, Adam Langley writes about plans for removing online certificate revocation checking in the Chrome/Chromium browser. Instead of OCSP and CRL checks, Google will be pushing lists of revoked certificates to the browser. "While the benefits of online revocation checking are hard to find, the costs are clear: online revocation checks are slow and compromise privacy. The median time for a successful OCSP check is ~300ms and the mean is nearly a second. This delays page loading and discourages sites from using HTTPS. They are also a privacy concern because the CA learns the IP address of users and which sites they're visiting. [...] On this basis, we're currently planning on disabling online revocation checks in a future version of Chrome. (There is a class of higher-security certificate, called an EV certificate, where we haven't made a decision about what to do yet.)"

 

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