USENIX Conference Policies
The (Decentralized) SSL Observatory
Peter Eckersley, Senior Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Jesse Burns, Founding Partner, iSEC Partners
The EFF SSL Observatory project collects and publishes comprehensive datasets of the TLS/SSL certificates used by servers on the public Internet. These datasets provide numerous insights into the ways cryptography is used on the Web and the collective role of Certificate Authorities (CAs) in authenticating Web servers. This talk will review previous findings from the project's scans of port 443 in IPv4 address space and will present several new results. It will also describe the design and initial findings from the new, decentralized version of the Observatory.
Peter Eckersley, Senior Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Peter Eckersley is a Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His work at EFF has included privacy and security projects, such as Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere, Surveillance Self-Defense International, and the SSL Observatory, and running the first controlled tests to confirm that Comcast was using forged reset packets to interfere with P2P protocols. Peter's PhD at the University of Melbourne was on digital copyright and alternatives to digital copyright.
Jesse Burns, Founding Partner, iSEC Partners
Jesse Burns is a Principal Partner at iSec Partners, an application security consulting firm. His clients include many of the world's largest technology, telecommunications, and financial services firms.
author = {Peter Eckersley and Jesse Burns},
title = {The (Decentralized) {SSL} Observatory},
booktitle = {20th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 11)},
year = {2011},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenix-security-11/decentralized-ssl-observatory},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}