Patent ID: 8112624

Claim:
A method of compressing a certificate revocation list (CRL) in a computer system having a certification authority (CA), the method comprising: accessing the CRL, wherein the CRL comprises at least one certificate revocation record (CRR) associated with a revoked certificate; compressing the at least one CRR by compressing a serial number of the revoked certificate and at least one certificate extension associated with the revoked certificate based on a lossless compression procedure that performs at least one of entropy encoding or dictionary encoding; storing the compressed at least one CRR in a body portion of a compressed CRL associated with the CA; and modifying a header portion of the compressed CRL to indicate that the body portion of the CRL is compressed, the modifying comprising generating a location index in the header portion of the compressed CRL, the location index indicating a location of the compressed at least one CRR in the body portion, wherein the header portion of the compressed CRL is uncompressed and the body portion of the compressed CRL is compressed.