Here's my cert, so trust me, maybe?: understanding TLS errors on the web

Authors:
Devdatta Akhawe;Bernhard Amann;Matthias Vallentin;Robin Sommer
Affiliations:
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
Year:
2013

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Abstract

When browsers report TLS errors, they cannot distinguish between attacks and harmless server misconfigurations; hence they leave it to the user to decide whether continuing is safe. However, actual attacks remain rare. As a result, users quickly become used to "false positives" that deplete their attention span, making it unlikely that they will pay sufficient scrutiny when a real attack comes along. Consequently, browser vendors should aim to minimize the number of low-risk warnings they report. To guide that process, we perform a large-scale measurement study of common TLS warnings. Using a set of passive network monitors located at different sites, we identify the prevalence of warnings for a total population of about 300,000 users over a nine-month period. We identify low-risk scenarios that consume a large chunk of the user attention budget and make concrete recommendations to browser vendors that will help maintain user attention in high-risk situations. We study the impact on end users with a data set much larger in scale than the data sets used in previous TLS measurement studies. A key novelty of our approach involves the use of internal browser code instead of generic TLS libraries for analysis, providing more accurate and representative results.