Paper 2025/610

Clubcards for the WebPKI: smaller certificate revocation tests in theory and practice

Abstract

CRLite is a low-bandwidth, low-latency, privacy-preserving mechanism for distributing certificate revocation data. A CRLite aggregator periodically encodes revocation data into a compact static hash set, or membership test, which can can be downloaded by clients and queried privately. We present a novel data-structure for membership tests, which we call a clubcard, and we evaluate the encoding efficiency of clubcards using data from Mozilla's CRLite infrastructure. As of November 2024, the WebPKI contains over 900 million valid certificates and over 8 million revoked certificates. We describe an instantiation of CRLite that encodes the revocation status of these certificates in a 6.7 MB package. This is $$ smaller than the original instantiation of CRLite presented at the 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and it is $$ smaller than the lower bound claimed in that work. A sequence of clubcards can encode a dynamic dataset like the WebPKI revocation set. Using data from late 2024 again, we find that clubcards encoding 6 hour delta updates to the WebPKI can be compressed to 26.8 kB on average---a size that makes CRLite truly practical. We have extended Mozilla's CRLite infrastructure so that it can generate clubcards, and we have added client-side support for this system to Firefox. We report on some performance aspects of our implementation, which is currently the default revocation checking mechanism in Firefox Nightly, and we propose strategies for further reducing the bandwidth requirements of CRLite.