A hard lesson: Assessing the HTTPS deployment of Italian university websites

In this paper we carry out a systematic analysis of the state of the HTTPS deployment of the most popular Italian university websites. Our analysis focuses on three different key aspects: HTTPS adoption and activation, HTTPS certificates, and cryptographic TLS implementations. Our investigation shows that the current state of the HTTPS deployment is unsatisfactory, yet it is possible to significantly improve the level of security by working exclusively at the web application layer. We hope this observation will encourage site operators to take actions to improve the current state of protection