Modeling and Evaluation of Certification Path Discovery in the Emerging Global PKI

Establishing trust on certificates across multiple domains requires an efficient certification path discovery algorithm. Previously, small exmaples are used to analyze the performance of certification path discovery. In this work, we propose and implement a simulation framework and a probability search tree model for systematic performance evaluation. Built from measurement data collected from current PKI systems in development and deployment over more than 10 countries, our model is (to the best of our knowledge) the largest simulated PKI architecture to-date.