Subject: Re: [certid] SSL Labs

From: Ivan Ristic <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 10:51:03 +0000

[I apologise for not replying to the original email(s), but I've just
subscribed to this list.]

JeffH wrote:
> That explanation hints that most all the certs represented in the dataset would
> be "valid" certs. However, there's ~150k more entries in the dbase than
> the ~720K valid certs he observed. Though, there's ~150k apparently "self-signed"
> certs in the dbase, so perhaps that's what's filling out the dbase.

The term "potentially valid" would be more accurate. The purpose of
the survey was to investigate how is an average SSL server configured
and for that we wanted to look at those servers that someone at least
tried to configure properly. There are so many invalid certificates
out there, so taking the configuration of all SSL servers would
pollute the data.

I defined "potentially valid" as residing on a domain name that
matches the certificate. Trust was not a factor, and that's why there
are self-signed certificates in the database. In addition, there's
only one certificate per domain name and IP address.

The 720K certificates were obtained from the 119M data set of domain
name registrations. The additional 150K were obtained by looking at
the Alexa's top 1M sites, as well as by data mining web site names
from the certificates we obtained. The fact that there's about 150K
self-signed certificates is a coincidence.

-- 
Ivan Ristic
ModSecurity Handbook [http://www.modsecurityhandbook.com]
SSL Labs [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssldb/]