Presentation suggestion for Chicago

[Giovane C. M. Moura]

Dear chairs,

We have a work that we'd like to submit for the next IEPG meeting in
Chicago.

The paper, currently under review, is entitled " No domain left behind:
is Let's Encrypt democratizing encryption?"  You can find it at [1].

Relevance to the IEPG audience: our paper measures in fact
the efforts employed by the industry and the community to improve the
adoption of encryption. We show that once costs and complexity are
removed, we can pretty much have encryption adoption in bulk -- lessons
that can be generalized for other security-related deployment issues.


More info below:

Title:  No domain left behind: is Let's Encrypt democratizing encryption?
Authors: Maarten Aertsen, Maciej Korczyński, Giovane C. M. Moura,
Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob, Jan van den Berg

Abstract: "
    The 2013 National Security Agency revelations of pervasive
monitoring have lead to an "encryption rush" across the computer and
Internet industry. To push back against massive surveillance and protect
users privacy, vendors, hosting and cloud providers have widely deployed
encryption on their hardware, communication links, and applications. As
a consequence, the most of web traffic nowadays is encrypted. However,
there is still a significant part of Internet traffic that is not
encrypted. It has been argued that both costs and complexity associated
with obtaining and deploying X.509 certificates are major barriers for
widespread encryption, since these certificates are required to
established encrypted connections. To address these issues, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and the University
of Michigan have set up Let's Encrypt (LE), a certificate authority that
provides both free X.509 certificates and software that automates the
deployment of these certificates. In this paper, we investigate if LE
has been successful in democratizing encryption: we analyze certificate
issuance in the first year of LE and show from various perspectives that
LE adoption has an upward trend and it is in fact being successful in
covering the lower-cost end of the hosting market.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03005

thanks and best,

/giovane