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ATHENE researchers place paper at USENIX 2025
ATHENE is again successfully represented at this year's USENIX. Several papers from ATHENE contributing researchers were accepted at the 34. USENIX Security Symposium. USENIX is one of the four most important conferences in the field of security. Scientists, practitioners, system administrators and programmers from around the world gather to share the latest advances in security and privacy of computer systems and networks.
Accepted papers are:
S/MINE: Collecting and Analyzing S/MIME Certificates at Scale
Authors: Samson Umezulike, Christoph Saatjohann, Fabian Ising, Sebastian Schinzel
In a first for the field, researchers conducted a comprehensive investigation of the actual S/MIME certificate landscape. They analyzed over 41 million unique X.509 certificates from public LDAP servers, 38 million of which met the criteria for use with S/MIME in email clients. The study reveals that it is extremely challenging for senders to reconstruct trust chains for S/MIME certificates, with the majority of certificates being issued by non-publicly recognised certification authorities. Nevertheless, the study found that S/MIME PKI is generally developing in the right direction, with weak cryptographic algorithms gradually being eliminated and more secure certificates being issued. The analysis also highlights the need to improve the underlying standards and email clients regarding defining S/MIME certificates and distributing certificate chains by certification authorities.
SoK: An Introspective Analysis of RPKI Security
Authors: Donika Mirdita, Haya Schulmann, Michael Waidner
The researchers present the first comprehensive, systematic overview of security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), which is the primary protection mechanism for inter-domain routing against prefix hijacking attacks. Their measurements reveal that 56% of global RPKI validators are susceptible to at least one documented vulnerability, despite the fact that 27% of networks already utilise RPKI for BGP validation and nearly half of all global prefixes are covered by RPKI. This study is the first to systematically organise existing knowledge about RPKI security research and supplement it with new measurements on the availability of RPKI repositories and their communication patterns with validators, providing a comprehensive overview of the vulnerabilities and their causes.
The scientists will present their papers in August at the 34. USENIX in Seattle, USA.
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