Lightsource Technologies

T-OCSP

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corestreet_logo_r_260x80.jpg   T- OCSP

                   

 

Tradtional Online Certificate Status (T-OCSP)

Traditional OCSP is a technology which alleviates some of the scalability issues of CRLs by adding a layer of Responders between the Certificate Authority, which is the source of the CRL, and the clients. The Responders all receive a CRL, and the clients ask a Responder for validation information about a set of credentials to determine whether a person is authorised to do what he or she is trying to do.

Using T-OCSP, the size of the CRL is no longer as problematic since the clients never receive the entire list of revoked certificates, instead receiving a relatively small amount of information regarding a particular certificate. However, because each Responder is a security risk, the cost of protecting each of them from attack is large. Because of this, it is often cost-prohibitive to set up multiple Responders in several locations, and with fewer Responders a system will be significantly slower.

Advantages/Disadvantages
  • + Small bandwidth between responder and clients
  • + Works with all issued certificates
  • + Industry standard
  • - Requires trusted responders (extremely expensive)
  • - Requires digital signing at each transaction (very slow)
  • - Does not scale past 100,000 users
  • - Loss of security if any responder is compromised
Suitable Applications
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OSCP works well for deployments with tens of thousands of users, in close proximity to each other. For example, a university with a single large campus could issue smartcards to all its students which allow them access to dormitories, libraries, and campus-wide computer networks.

 

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