security.txt Revisited: Analysis of Prevalence and Conformity in 2022

Abstract

Determining the correct contact person for a particular system or organization is challenging in today’s Internet architecture. However, there are various stakeholders who will need to have such information, such as national security teams, security researchers, or Internet service providers, among others. To address this problem, RFC 9116, or better known as “security.txt,” was developed. If implemented correctly, then it can help these stakeholders in finding contact information to be used to notify an organization of any security issues. Further, there is another proposal called “dnssecuritytxt,” which uses DNS records for this purpose. In this research article, we evaluated the prevalence of websites that have implemented security.txt and their conformity with the standard. Through a longitudinal analysis of the top one million websites, we investigated the adoption and usage of this standard among organizations. Our results show that the overall adoption of security.txt remains low, especially among less popular websites. To drive its acceptance among organizations, security researchers, and developers, we derived several recommendations, including partnerships with vendors of browsers and content management systems.