About

Henry Birge-Lee is a research software engineer at Princeton University with a B.A. in Computer Science from Princeton University. His research interests include network security, the PKI, and secure inter-domain routing. The aim of Henry's research has always been real-world impact and he demonstrates this with significant collaborations with industry and standards bodies.

He is an inventor and key advocate of Multi-Perspective Issuance Corroboration (MPIC) which introduced in his 2018 paper "Bamboozling Certificate Authorities with BGP." MPIC is deployed by Let’s Encrypt and Google Trust Services where it has secured the issuance of over one billion digital certificates. Henry participated in the MPIC standards work team lead by the Chrome root program and drafted the change to the CA/Browser Forum's requirements for TLS certificate issuance that requires all Certificate Authorities to use MPIC. The CA/Browser Forum unanimously voted to adopt MPIC which is required to be used for all certificate issuance starting in March 2025. Henry is also a founder and lead developer of the Open MPIC project which offers an open source implementation of MPIC.

Henry's work has been recognized as a 2-time runner up for the Caspar Bowden PET Award for an outstanding contribution to privacy enhancing technologies ('20 and '22) as well as a finalist in the CSAW’21 Applied Research Competition. His talk "Using BGP to acquire bogus TLS certificates" was awarded Best Talk at HotPETS '17. Henry has also worked on routing security policy being an author of Princeton's response to FCC's inquiry on routing security and the BITAG Report on the Security of the Internet’s Routing Infrastructure.

Henry won the Calvin Dodd MacCracken Senior Thesis Award for the most distinctive thesis in the Princeton School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and was runner up for the Computing Research Association's Undergraduate Researcher Award for outstanding research selected from computer science undergraduates across the country. He was also awarded the Outstanding Computer Science Senior Thesis Prize for having a top undergraduate thesis in the Princeton coputer science department.