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OCSP stapling decreases the load on a PKI infrastructure's OCSP server by attaching a signed OCSP response to the target in a TLS connection. In addition it creates a more secure/private session since the CA doesn't know that your browser is accessing a given site. Some people have compared this behavior to Kerberos.

Question

  • What web browsers support OCSP stapling?

  • Are there any implementation considerations among different browsers that need to be addressed to maintain uniform privacy and performance benefits?

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As a note - in a regular SSL session, the CA does not know the browser is accessing the site. There is nothing in the SSL protocol that involves the browser talking to the CA in anyway. Nor is OCSP required. I would not, in fact, call it "more secure" as some systems see having a fresh made-for-you OCSP response as the better security implementation. – bethlakshmi May 1 '12 at 19:24

4 Answers

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My impression is that, roughly speaking, no one supports OCSP stapling. I'd be happy to hear of counterexamples.

Mozilla has an open bug to support OCSP stapling, so I would guess that they do not support it at the moment.

The Chrome team has announced that they plan to remove OCSP checks entirely, so they're certainly not going to be doing OCSP stapling.

Here is some more information on browser support for OCSP (but not OCSP stapling, unfortunately).

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You can test OCSP stapling support in Your browser on http://www.vpnhosting.cz/ocsp.

It is in Czech language, if You can see OCSP_stapling_disabled, OCSP stapling is disabled, OCSP_stapling_enabled means, that OCSP stapling works.

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looks like Opera 12.01 on Linux does support it, nice – Hubert Kario Sep 25 '12 at 11:34
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IE has supported it since Vista, Chrome supports it on Windows via CryptoAPI and on other platforms via patches to NSS it made that Firefox has not accepted, Opera has also supported it for several years. Firefox has the worst revocation behavior of any browser on a number of fronts its lack of support of OCSP stapling being the smallest example. Also Chrome will continue to support OCSP and OCSP stapling in enterprise scenarios they have provided their own revocation checking mechanism for a variety of reasons.

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Any sources for that? – Hubert Kario May 20 '12 at 11:40
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Even with OCSP stapling, the act of verifying the OCSP signature may expose personal information to the OCSP signing root. Additionally the OCSP singing root can be a 3rd party to the entire infrastructure as shown here:

PKI hierarchy with two roots

source

Although there are security benefits to validating the signing OCSP signature, if privacy concerns outweigh security the following extension disables the signing functionality szOID_PKIX_OCSP_NOCHECK (1.3.6.1.5.5.7.48.1.5) (note it is up to the CA to implement this extension)

If you want to use CRL instead of OCSP, you can set the following setting to 1 or zero on a Windows machine

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\SystemCertificates\ChainEngine\Config\CryptnetCachedOcspSwitchToCrlCount
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Isn't this the case only when you want to check the validity of intermediate CA certificates in OCSP responder certificate and the OCSP stapled response doesn't have them already? In other words, it is a security hole but lot smaller than not checking revocation at all? – Hubert Kario Jul 12 '12 at 11:30

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