Collected research

Cloud Strife: Mitigating the Security Risks of Domain-Validated Certificates

Kevin Borgolte, Tobias Fiebig, Shuang Hao, Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna · ndss-symposium.org

Stale DNS records that still point at cloud IP addresses their owner has released let an attacker re-allocate the same address and pass automated domain validation, obtaining a browser-trusted certificate for someone else's domain. Over 700,000 exposed domains were found, with takeover practical in under 70 seconds for under a dollar; a trust-based ACME challenge is proposed.

Record

Researcher

Kevin Borgolte, Tobias Fiebig, Shuang Hao, Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna

Published by

ndss-symposium.org

Format

Whitepaper

Topic

Browser

In the archive

• Collected in the 2018 research round

Related sources

• NDSS 2018 Cloud Strife: Mitigating the Security Risks of Domain-Validated Certificates

Tags

• dns
• tls
• auth-bypass
• https
• aws
• azure
• large-scale-scan
• measurement-study
• mitigation
• owasp-a01-2021
• owasp-a02-2021

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Kevin Borgolte, Tobias Fiebig, Shuang Hao, Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 14 August 2026.