A First Look into the Third-Party Web Dependencies in China
Zhenyu Li, Yiwen Huang · 2023
Many network services are provided by third-party providers, e.g. name resolution, content hosting, certificate authorities. Dependence on these providers may lead to cascading failures, resulting in many websites becoming unavailable. To mitigate the failures, it is necessary to have a deep understanding of the current situation of third-party dependencies. In this paper, we analyze the web dependencies on third-party DNS, content delivery networks and certificate authorities. We focus on the discrepancies that might exist between China and the global footprint. Our results reveals that while both China’s and global websites rely on third-party providers heavily, popular websites in China prefer building private name resolution services and deploy CDNs more redundantly. Perhaps more importantly, CA verification in China is dominated by DigiCert and fewer China’s websites enable OCSP Stapling, making the HTTPs ecosystem in China extremely fragile.