  In a public-key infrastructure (PKI), clients must have an efficient and
secure way to determine whether a certificate was revoked (by an entity
considered as legitimate to do so), while preserving user privacy. A few
certification authorities (CAs) are currently responsible for the issuance of
the large majority of TLS certificates. These certificates are considered valid
only if the certificate of the issuing CA is also valid. The certificates of
these important CAs are effectively too big to be revoked, as revoking them
would result in massive collateral damage. To solve this problem, we redesign
the current revocation system with a novel approach that we call PKI Safety Net
(PKISN), which uses publicly accessible logs to store certificates (in the
spirit of Certificate Transparency) and revocations. The proposed system
extends existing mechanisms, which enables simple deployment. Moreover, we
present a complete implementation and evaluation of our scheme.
