Karthikeyan Bhargavan
More info
- Affiliation
- Inria Paris
- Known for
- miTLS, HACL*, FREAK, Logjam, SLOTH
Researcher who proves cryptographic protocols correct and, along the way, finds the places where they aren't.
Bhargavan's group at Inria in Paris built miTLS, a TLS implementation with machine-checked security proofs. Formalising the protocol turned out to be a very good way of finding bugs in everybody else's. Triple Handshake came in 2014; FREAK in 2015, where clients could be tricked into accepting export-grade RSA keys left over from the crypto wars; and Logjam the same year, against weak Diffie-Hellman groups. In 2016 SLOTH showed that MD5 was still exploitable in handshakes.
The work fed directly into the design of TLS 1.3. The group's formally verified crypto library HACL* ships in Firefox and the Linux kernel, and Bhargavan co-founded Cryspen.