Kenny Paterson
More info
- Affiliation
- ETH Zürich, formerly Royal Holloway
- Known for
- Lucky Thirteen, RC4 attacks on TLS
Cryptographer who specialises in showing that protocols secure on paper are not secure as actually implemented.
At Royal Holloway in London, Paterson built a group that worked methodically through the standard protocols. In 2007 he and Jean Paul Degabriele showed that encryption-only IPsec could be broken. 2013 delivered two blows to TLS in one year: Lucky Thirteen with Nadhem AlFardan, a timing-based padding oracle against CBC mode, and a statistical attack on RC4 with, among others, Daniel J. Bernstein.
Between them, the two attacks left TLS with no cipher free of known weaknesses until AES-GCM became widespread. RC4 was banned from TLS in 2015. Since 2019 Paterson has led the Applied Cryptography group at ETH Zürich, where he has given Telegram and cloud storage services the same treatment.