Understanding Student Experiences with TLS Client Authentication

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 15 Apr 2026] Understanding Student Experiences with TLS Client Authentication Abubakar Sadiq Shittu, Clay Shubert, John Sadik, Scott Ruoti Mutual TLS (mTLS) provides strong, certificate-based authentication for both clients and servers, yet its adoption for user-facing websites remains rare. This paper presents a longitudinal study of mTLS usability, tracking 46 senior and graduate computer science students who configured client certificates from scratch, used them for routine authentication over a semester-long course, and managed credentials across multiple devices. The results reveal that initial setup is a major bottleneck; while daily use was considered smooth, it did not improve long-term usability perceptions. Most concerningly, only 9% of participants fully understood the security implications of certificate-based authentication. We conclude that in a realistic, tooling-heavy deployment utilizing OpenSSL, a custom CA, and a 3072-bit minimum key requirement, even highly technical students struggled significantly. We argue this provides empirical evidence that today mTLS user experience is fundamentally misaligned with non-PKI specialists, and it is difficult to see a path toward mainstream adoption without substantial platform-level changes. Comments: 17 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. Longitudinal usability study with 46 participants over one semester. Preprint Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.14330 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.14330v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.14330 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Abubakar Sadiq Shittu [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:37:34 UTC (176 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)