Verifiable Light-Weight Monitoring for Certificate Transparency Logs.

Trust in publicly verifiable Certificate Transparency (CT) logs is reduced through cryptography, gossip, auditing, and monitoring. The role of a monitor is to observe each and every log entry, looking for suspicious certificates that interest the entity running the monitor. While anyone can run a monitor, it requires continuous operation and copies of the logs to be inspected. This has lead to the emergence of monitoring as-a-service: a trusted third-party runs the monitor and provides registered subjects with selective certificate notifications. We present a CT/bis extension for verifiable light-weight monitoring that enables subjects to verify the correctness of such certificate notifications, making it easier to distribute and reduce the trust which is otherwise placed in these monitors. Our extension supports verifiable monitoring of wild-card domains and piggybacks on CT's existing gossip-audit security model.