[lamps] Re: TLS Client Certificates; a survey

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 7:46 AM John Mattsson <john.mattsson=
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Very unrelated from WebPKI, but almost all 3GPP use of TLS, DTLS, and QUIC
> are mutually authenticated and will continue rely on TLS-Client
> certificates. 3GPP relies on the Internet PKI profile (RFC 5280) for
> everything including device certificates. I think the same applies to the
> other large use cases of mTLS in enterprise, government, and IoT.
>
> I am worried about recent trends to use WebPKI for non-Web use cases. The
> WebPKI relies on hundreds of trusted roots, have quite weak security for
> issuance, does not do revocations,
>

This statement is not correct. The WebPKI does do revocations. In fact,
there are so many
revocations (about 8 million/1% of the issued number) that you need special
data structures
to efficiently propagate the revocations to the browser [0]

-Ekr

[0]
https://research.mozilla.org/files/2025/04/clubcards_for_the_webpki.pdf?_gl=1*11knujb*_ga*MTM3MDA3NjU1My4xNzYyMzgyNzQ1*_ga_X4N05QV93S*czE3NzQyNzc5OTMkbzI5JGcwJHQxNzc0Mjc3OTkzJGo2MCRsMCRoMA
..

and now will not do client authentication. It is very unsuitable for most
> other use cases. Similarly, technologies and policies like transparency and
> short-term certificates might not be adding much for other applications.
>
> Cheers,
> John Preuß Mattsson
>
> *From: *Salz, Rich <rsalz=[e-mail]>
> *Date: *Monday, 23 March 2026 at 15:36
> *To: *Tls <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] <[e-mail]>
> *Subject: *[TLS] TLS Client Certificates; a survey
>
> Since WebPKI CA’s will not be able to issue TLS-Client certificates, what
> are the customers and CAs thinking of doing?
>
> Replies to be will be summarized to both lists. Please be careful if you
> use reply-all.
>
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