Ian Goldberg
More info
- Affiliation
- University of Waterloo
- Known for
- Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR), the Netscape SSL break
Canadian cryptographer who broke Netscape's SSL as a student and later invented OTR, the protocol that taught chat to forget.
In 1995 Goldberg and David Wagner, then grad students at Berkeley, showed that Netscape seeded its SSL random number generator with the time of day and process IDs. Session keys could be guessed in seconds. It became one of the early textbook cases of strong cryptography undone by weak randomness.
In 2004 he and Nikita Borisov published Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR), with the pointed subtitle "Why Not To Use PGP". Unlike PGP, OTR offered forward secrecy and deniability — the cryptographic equivalent of a private conversation. It lived on as a plugin for Pidgin, and its ideas run straight through the Signal Protocol.