Matt Blaze
More info
- Affiliation
- AT&T Bell Labs, UPenn, Georgetown
- Known for
- The Clipper flaw, master-key attack, trust management
The researcher who showed in 1994 that the Clipper chip's backdoor could be bypassed — and later did much the same to mechanical locks.
The US government's Clipper chip was meant to give law enforcement an escrowed key to every call through a field called the LEAF. Blaze, then at AT&T Bell Labs, noticed the field was protected by a checksum of just 16 bits: try about 65,000 values and you could send a bogus LEAF and encrypt with no backdoor at all. The paper became one of the heaviest arguments of the Crypto Wars.
In 2003 he turned cryptanalytic thinking on master-keyed lock systems and showed how anyone with an ordinary key could work out the master with a handful of blanks. Locksmiths were not delighted. He has also worked on trust management, proxy re-encryption and voting-machine audits.