The Rise of Certificate Transparency and Its Implications on the Internet Ecosystem

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of Certificate Transparency (CT) over time and explore the implications of exposing certificate DNS names from the perspective of security and privacy. We find that certificates in CT logs have seen exponential growth. Website support for CT has also constantly increased, with now 33% of established connections supporting CT. With the increasing deployment of CT, there are also concerns of information leakage due to all certificates being visible in CT logs. To understand this threat, we introduce a CT honeypot and show that data from CT logs is being used to identify targets for scanning campaigns only minutes after certificate issuance. We present and evaluate a methodology to learn and validate new subdomains from the vast number of domains extracted from CT logged certificates.Comment: To be published at ACM IMC 201

Bridging Alone: Religious Conservatism, Marital Homogamy, and Voluntary Association Membership

This study characterizes social insularity of religiously conservative American married couples by examining patterns of voluntary associationmembership. Constructing a dataset of 3938 marital dyads from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, the author investigates whether conservative religious homogamy encourages membership in religious voluntary groups and discourages membership in secular voluntary groups. Results indicate that couples’ shared affiliation with conservative denominations, paired with beliefs in biblical authority and inerrancy, increases the likelihood of religious group membership for husbands and wives and reduces the likelihood of secular group membership for wives, but not for husbands. The social insularity of conservative religious groups appears to be reinforced by homogamy—particularly by wives who share faith with husbands

How do people perceive the relationship between science and religion? The roles of epistemic and ontological cognition

Although the relationship between religion and science has long been the subject of discussion, investigations into the how and why of people's science-religion perspectives are rare. This study examined how epistemic and ontological cognition predict agreement with four science-religion perspectives: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. Participants (N = 3911) were Finnish, Danish, and Dutch adults who had answered an online study. Most people held views that were not well captured by the commonly used four categories. When more specific perspectives were examined, differences were found especially in supernatural beliefs, over-mentalizing, and justifications for religious arguments and scientific knowledge. Thinking styles and epistemic sophistication played only a minor role. The results suggest that non-scientists evaluate the relationship between religion and science more based on their ontological beliefs than their epistemic reflection.Peer reviewe