About

Henry Birge-Lee is a research software engineer at Princeton University. His work with Let’s Encrypt on multi-vantage-point domain validation has secured the issuance of over a billion certificates. Taking a non-conventional track, Henry began his Bachelor’s degree at Princeton University in 2015 and then took a three-year leave of absence to work as a research specialist at Princeton University and completed his Bachelor’s in computer science at Princeton University in 2021 (where he has worked as a research software engineer since). 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. Henry’s paper “Experiences Deploying Multi-Vantage-Point Domain Validation at Let's Encrypt” was runner up for the 2022 Caspar Bowden PET Award for an outstanding contribution to privacy enhancing technologies, his paper “Bamboozling Certificate Authorities with BGP” was also runner up for the 2020 Caspar Bowden PET Award, and his talk “Using BGP to acquire bogus TLS certificates” was awarded Best Talk at HotPETS ’17. Henry’s research interests include network security with a particular focus on BGP, the PKI, inter-domain networking, and secure routing. Among other projects, Henry is currently continuing his research in collaboration with Let’s Encrypt to expand their deployment of multi-vantage-point, working on a join project with researchers at ETH Zurich and University of Virginia to bring the security benefits of the next-generation SCION Internet architecture to non-participating networks, and developing secure telemetry-based multi-path inter-domain routing. In addition, Henry places a large focus on industry and policy engagement which is shown through invited presentations at the CA and Browser Forum (both the Validation Working Group and a presentation to the entire forum at their Face-to-Face meeting) and authorship of several guidance documents for interdomain routing security (like Princeton’s Center for Information Technology and Policy’s public comment to the FCC on BGP security and the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group’s report on Security of the Internet’s Routing Infrastructure).