David Wagner
More info
- Known for
- The Netscape RNG break, slide and boomerang attacks, Twofish
- Affiliation
- UC Berkeley
Berkeley cryptographer who broke Netscape's SSL as a grad student and has been finding holes in everything from phones to voting machines ever since.
In 1995 Wagner and Ian Goldberg showed that Netscape seeded its random number generator with the clock and process IDs, making SSL session keys guessable in seconds. A few years later the same pair, with Marc Briceno, took apart GSM's COMP128 authentication algorithm so that SIM cards could be cloned.
On the theory side he co-designed the Twofish block cipher (1998) and developed the slide attack with Alex Biryukov and the boomerang attack, both in 1999. In 2007 he helped lead California's top-to-bottom review of voting machines, which found roughly what you would expect from computers bought from the lowest bidder.