Solving the Problem of Certificate Revocation Status with Lists and OCSP Servers

Revocation of certificates is a challenging problem with multiple solutions. One solution is to maintain a list of revoked certificates, but this list can quickly become large. Another solution is the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) server, where clients or servers ping the OCSP server to check if a certificate has been revoked. However, this solution raises privacy concerns as the OCSP server can know every website visited. OCSP stapling is another solution that allows the server to prove that a certificate has not been rejected by asynchronously checking with an OCSP server. This eliminates the need for clients to ping the OCSP server. Certificate rejection check is also a challenge, especially for CDNs like Cloudflare that decrypt every request and can see everything. However, this might be acceptable for some users.