Dealing with Residual Certificates for Pre-owned Domains

Architecture and Background

When purchasing a new domain name you would expect that you are the only one who can obtain a valid SSL certificate for it, however that is not always the case.

Vulnerability Analysis

When the domain had a prior owner(s), even several years prior, they may still possess a valid SSL certificate for it and there is very little you can do about it. Using Certificate Transparency, we examined millions of domains and certificates and found thousands of examples where the previous owner for a domain still possessed a valid SSL certificate for the domain long after it changed ownership.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

We will review the results from our ongoing large scale quantitative analysis over past and current domains and certificates. We'll explore the massive scale of the problem, what we can do about it, how you can protect yourself, and a proposed process change to make this less of a problem going forwards.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

We end by introducing BygoneSSL, a new tool and dashboard that shows an up to date view of affected domains and certificates using publicly available DNS data and Certificate Transparency logs. BygoneSSL will demonstrate how widespread the issue is, let domain owners determine if they could be affected, and can be used to track the number of affected domains over time.