Measuring HTTPS Adoption on the Web Adrienne Porter Felt, Google; Richard Barnes, Cisco; April King, Mozilla; Chris Palmer, Chris Bentzel, and Parisa Tabriz, Google https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity17/technical-sessions/presentation/felt This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium August 16–18, 2017 • Vancouver, BC, Canada ISBN 978-1-931971-40-9 Open access to the Proceedings of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium is sponsored by USENIX Measuring HTTPS Adoption on the Web Adrienne Porter Felt1, Richard Barnes2, April King3, Chris Palmer1, Chris Bentzel1, Parisa Tabriz1 1Google, 2Cisco, 3Mozilla 1felt, palmer, cbentzel,
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[email protected] Abstract [1, 24, 32, 3]). They plan to make further changes as HTTPS becomes the default standard [30, 3]. How HTTPS ensures that the Web has a base level of pri- close is the Web to considering HTTPS a default? vacy and integrity. Security engineers, researchers, and browser vendors have long worked to spread HTTPS to as much of the Web as possible via outreach efforts, de- In this paper, we measure HTTPS adoption rates from veloper tools, and browser changes. How much progress the perspectives of both clients and servers. A key chal- have we made toward this goal of widespread HTTPS lenge is that there are many ways to measure client us- adoption? We gather metrics to benchmark the status age and server support of HTTPS, each yielding differ- and progress of HTTPS adoption on the Web in 2017. ent findings on the prevalence of HTTPS. For example, To evaluate HTTPS adoption from a user perspective, HTTPS is a much higher fraction of browser page loads we collect large-scale, aggregate user metrics from two if the metrics count certain types of in-page navigations.