Itsik Mantin
More info
- Affiliation
- Weizmann Institute, later Imperva
- Known for
- FMS attack, Bar Mitzvah attack
Israeli cryptographer who spent much of a career demonstrating that RC4 was more broken than anyone cared to admit.
As a master's student under Adi Shamir at the Weizmann Institute, Mantin was the "M" in the 2001 FMS attack. The same year he and Shamir showed that the second output byte of RC4 is zero twice as often as chance allows, one of the first exploitable RC4 biases and enough to attack broadcast messages encrypted under different keys.
Fourteen years later, now a researcher at the security firm Imperva, he came back to the same cipher with the Bar Mitzvah attack at Black Hat Asia 2015. It relied on a class of weak keys he had described in 2001, and was named for the fact that the flaw had just turned thirteen. RFC 7465 banned RC4 from TLS that same year.