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I've been wondering why CRL couldn't be used if the OCSP goes down or no reply is received. That way you get the benefits of both. Any reason why this would be a bad idea?

Also are CRLs really that bad in practice? I know it would be a bad idea on a smartphone but is it really an issue on a laptop?

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The other main issue is bandwidth. For a CRL, Apple has to serve the full list of revoked serial numbers (or some shard of it), even if 90% of users don’t have 90% of the revoked apps installed. I can’t remember where I read this, but I recall that after the Heartbleed disclosure one CA saw their CRL traffic grow by some number in the gigabits per second. Bandwidth is relatively cheap, but still not free (without even considering the argument of “do I need to know that the cert for an app that I will never use is revoked?”).

They have the bandwidth for some pretty big firmware/OS updates, though. This would be a fraction of that size. They download blacklists already for their inbuilt AV. Also if they use something like Git then only the changes will be downloaded rather than the entire CRL.

I can’t help but feel that the issue is something else, not bandwidth.

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