Collected research

Automatic Insecurity: Exploring Email Auto-configuration in the Wild

Shushang Wen, Yiming Zhang, Yuxiang Shen, Bingyu Li, Haixin Duan and Jingqiang Lin · NDSS Symposium

First systematic study of email auto-configuration, where a client fetches server settings from the domain or DNS instead of the user typing them. Ten attack scenarios covering seventeen defects let an attacker steer a client to an attacker-controlled mail server or a plaintext connection and take the credentials; 49,013 domains and 22 of 29 clients were affected.

Record

Researcher

Shushang Wen, Yiming Zhang, Yuxiang Shen, Bingyu Li, Haixin Duan and Jingqiang Lin

Published by

NDSS Symposium

Topic

Other

In the archive

• Collected in the 2025 research round

Related sources

• NDSS 2025 - Automatic Insecurity: Exploring Email Auto-configuration in the Wild
• NDSS 2025 - Automatic Insecurity: Exploring Email Auto-configuration in the Wild

Tags

• email
• smtp
• dns
• tls
• info-leak
• measurement-study
• large-scale-scan
• owasp-a02-2021

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Shushang Wen, Yiming Zhang, Yuxiang Shen, Bingyu Li, Haixin Duan and Jingqiang Lin, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 19 August 2026.