Speeding Up Post-Quantum TLS handshakes by Suppressing Intermediate CA Certificates (Q31b)
Traditionally, the most data-heavy part of a TLS handshake has been authentication which includes a handshake signature and certificates with public keys and signatures. Although most common TLS usecases are not significantly affected by long certificates or certificate chains, some constrained environments can see drastic performance degradation which has led them to look for options to alleviate the issue. Post-quantum signatures and keys, on the other hand, have been proven to noticeably slow down handshakes even for common Internet TLS applications due to significantly more amounts of post-quantum authentication data. One alleviation mechanism proposed in the literature is caching some of the authentication information. In this session, we will make the case for speeding up TLS handshakes by omitting the intermediate certificate authority certificates in the handshake. We will present how that can be achieved along with the usecases that will mostly benefit from such mechanisms. We will offer quantitative analysis to show that this approach is relatively straightforward, backwards compatible and with little overhead introduced for caching the certificates. We will also propose caching mechanisms based on different optimization goals.