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First Online: 29 March 2025

Declarations

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: We declare that we have no Conflict of interest that could influence the interpretation or evaluation of the results presented in this manuscript. Conflict of interest include, but are not limited to, financial, personal, or professional relationships that may have influenced the work or could be perceived to have influenced the work.

: In our research, we address the following ethical considerations: Firstly, we employ manual methods to retrieve certificate data from Alexa and Rapid7’s Sonar websites. Secondly, when communicating with Certificate Authorities (CAs), we ensure that the names of any other CAs involved in key sharing are not disclosed. Thirdly, we refrain from attributing blame to any CA for participating in key-sharing activities intentionally. Instead, we focus on discussing user adherence to best practices when obtaining certificates. Throughout our investigation, we place significant emphasis on safeguarding the privacy of Certificate Authorities (CAs). Our analysis strictly avoids accessing any single entity’s private key, and no information pertaining to entities containing user account details is disclosed.