Catherine Meadows
More info
- Affiliation
- U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
- Known for
- NRL Protocol Analyzer, Maude-NPA
Mathematician at the U.S. Navy's research lab who made formal analysis of cryptographic protocols something you could actually point at real standards.
Her NRL Protocol Analyzer, from the early 1990s, was one of the first tools to search backwards from an undesirable state — "the attacker knows the key" — to see whether it could be reached at all. In the late 1990s she turned it on IKE, the key exchange behind IPsec, and found weaknesses and ambiguities in a spec that was already shipping in routers.
Its successor, Maude-NPA, built with Santiago Escobar and José Meseguer, handles algebraic properties such as XOR and Diffie–Hellman exponentiation — precisely the details simpler models abstract away and attackers don't.