Customizing SSL Certificate Extensions to Reduce False-Positive Certificate Error/Warning Messages

Abstract

In today’s Internet world, X.509 certificates are commonly used in SSL protocol to provide security for web-based services by server/client authentication and secure communication. Although SSL protocol presents a technical basis, this web security largely depends on user awareness of security measures as well. There are significant number of scientific studies in the literature reporting that the count of invalid or self-signed certificate usage in today’s Internet can not be overlooked. At the same time, quite a number of studies place emphasis on the acquired indifference towards certificate warning messages which are popped up by web browsers when visiting web pages with invalid or self-signed certificates. In this study, with the importance of user’s daily practices in developing habits in mind, we studied a modification of X.509 certificates in order to reduce the number of false-positive certificate-warning pop ups in order to reduce gaining faulty usage habit of invalid certificates.