Inside Certificate Chains Beyond Public Issuers: Structure and Usage Analysis from a Campus Network Hongying Dong, Yizhe Zhang, Hyeonmin Lee, and Yixin Sun University of Virginia This paper has been published at IMC 2025. Summary We conduct research on the large-scale study of TLS certificate chains issued by non-public issuers (those absent from major browser root stores and the CCADB). Using one year of campus network traffic comprising over 259.

We provide the code used for our string-based matching (e.g., for certificates and certificate chains) in the analysis. Dataset Unfortunately, due to the sensitive nature of the data, we are unable to share the original datasets used in our study. GitHub repository You can download the code here - Link

If you have any questions regarding this paper, please feel free to contact us Hongying Dong, PhD, University of Virginia (now graduated) Yizhe Zhang, PhD Candidate, University of Virginia Hyeonmin Lee, Postdoc, University of Virginia Yixin Sun, Assistant Professor, University of Virginia