TLS 1.3 in Practice: How TLS 1.3 Contributes to Internet

Transport Layer Security (TLS) has become the norm for secure communication over the Internet. In August 2018, TLS 1.3, the latest version of TLS, was approved, providing improved security and performance of the previous TLS version. In this paper, we take a closer look at TLS 1.3 deployments in practice regarding adoption rate, security, performance, and implementation by applying temporal, spatial, and platform-based approaches on 687M  connections. Overall, TLS 1.3 has rapidly been adopted mainly due to third-party platforms such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) makes a significant contribution to the Internet. In fact, it deprecates vulnerable cryptographic primitives and substantially reduces the time required to perform the TLS 1.3 full handshake compared to the TLS 1.2 handshake. We quantify these aspects and show TLS 1.3 is beneficial to websites that do not rely on the third-party platforms. We also review Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) regarding TLS libraries and show that many of recent vulnerabilities can be easily addressed by upgrading to TLS 1.3. However, some websites exhibit unstable support for TLS 1.3 due to multiple platforms with different TLS versions or migration to other platforms, which means that a website can show the lower TLS version at a certain time or from a certain region. Furthermore, we find that most of the implementations (including TLS libraries) do not fully support the new features of TLS 1.3 such as downgrade protection and certificate extensions.