A security administrator receives an alert from a third-party vendor that indicates a certificate that was installed in the browser has been hijacked at the root of a small public CA. The security…

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), now largely superseded by TLS, is a protocol for encrypting communication and authenticating servers, not a solution for revoking compromised certificates.

A Certificate Revocation List (CRL) is a list published by a Certificate Authority (CA) that contains certificates that have been revoked before their scheduled expiration. By having the public CA revoke the hijacked root certificate and publish it in a CRL, client browsers and operating systems can efficiently download and check this list to identify and cease trusting the compromised certificate across all domain machines.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the entire system used to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates, but CRL is the specific component within PKI used for revocation, making it the more direct and specific solution for this issue.

An Access Control List (ACL) defines permissions and controls access to network resources or files, which is unrelated to the process of invalidating a compromised digital certificate.