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mieko • today at 9:02 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

For nearly a decade, I've been occasionally tracking how many of the Cloudflare top-2K sites (earlier: Alexa) respond with an EV cert. And then also pull the SSL Labs score to see if there was any correlation.

If anyone is interested:

https://github.com/mieko/greenbar

I should probably chart out the changes throughout the years, but this was more of a curiosity hack.


Replies

sekinfo • today at 9:35 PM

Great work, did a similar analysis recently but only for the top 50, and in fact none of the top 50 had an EV at the time of the survey.

I believe the only possible advantage of an EV is not a technical one, but rather an organizational one: it encourages the use of a unique keypair on each server because Wildcard coverage is not allowed (although multi-domain is allowed). For what appear to be non-technical reasons, I have seen many entities copying their keypairs for Wildcard certs between servers, even between business critical on-prem backends and cheap shared hosting or budget VPS, or handing the keypair over to a contractor via email.