Tracing Soon-to-Expire Federal .gov Certificates with CT Monitors
Jan 23, 2019Gabbi Fisher, Brendan McMillion
Summary
This post highlights a critical aspect of website security by detailing how Cloudflare leverages its Certificate Transparency (CT) monitor, Merkle Town, to identify and track soon-to-expire and expired TLS certificates on .gov websites. It emphasizes the importance of automated certificate renewal and the role of CT logs and monitors in ensuring the integrity and trustworthiness of secure connections, especially during unexpected events like government shutdowns. The post also details technical challenges and unexpected misconfigurations found during the analysis.
More from the Website Security & Threat Management trail
- We tested our own WAF with frontier AI models. Here’s what we found
- When scanners miss the attack: how Cloudflare Client-Side Security protects storefronts
- Introducing automatic remediation policies with Cloudflare CASB
- Introducing context-aware vulnerability discovery and remediation with Cloudflare Managed Defense and OpenAI Daybreak Models
- Introducing Adaptive Intelligence: undermining the economics of every bot attack