Revocation Checking and Chrome’s CRL
Adam Langley (via Wolf Rentzsch):
But an attacker who can intercept HTTPS connections can also make online revocation checks appear to fail and so bypass the revocation checks! In cases where the attacker can only intercept a subset of a victim’s traffic (i.e. the SSL traffic but not the revocation checks), the attacker is likely to be a backbone provider capable of DNS or BGP poisoning to block the revocation checks too.
If the attacker is close to the server then online revocation checks can be effective, but an attacker close to the server can get certificates issued from many CAs and deploy different certificates as needed. In short, even revocation checks don’t stop this from being a real mess.
So soft-fail revocation checks are like a seat-belt that snaps when you crash. Even though it works 99% of the time, it’s worthless because it only works when you don’t need it.
