Description
Certificate Transparency is an experimental protocol for publicly logging the existence of Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates as they are issued or observed, in a manner that allows anyone to audit certificate authority (CA) activity and notice the issuance of suspect certificates as well as to audit the certificate logs themselves. The intent is that eventually clients would refuse to honor certificates that do not appear in a log, effectively forcing CAs to add all issued certificates to the logs. Logs are network services that implement the protocol operations for submissions and queries that are defined in this document. (q.v. IETF RFC 6962)
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(q.v. https://www.certificate-transparency.org/what-is-ct)
Note that end user TLS clients are not responsible for validating CT logs, all they need to do is enforce a requirement that certificates must have extensions that show that they were issued under these procedures by validating a Signed Certificate Timestamp (SCT) data object presented with the TLS server certificate. Monitors and Auditors have the primary responsibility of detecting anomalous certificates that were never submitted to the logs.
According to wikipedia, the implementation status of the standard is as follows:
- Google launched its first certificate transparency log in March 2013.
- In September 2013, DigiCert became the first certificate authority to implement Certificate Transparency.
- Google Chrome began requiring Certificate Transparency for newly issued Extended Validation Certificates in 2015.
Champion / Stakeholder
Actors
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- Add to Log
- Retrieve information from Log
- Retrieve proof from Log
End State
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Success
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Failure
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