Nadhem AlFardan
More info
- Affiliation
- Royal Holloway (PhD)
- Known for
- Lucky Thirteen, RC4 attacks on TLS
The researcher who, while still a PhD student, helped knock out both cipher options TLS had left in 2013.
AlFardan did his doctorate at Royal Holloway under Kenny Paterson. In February 2013 they published Lucky Thirteen, a timing attack on CBC mode in TLS and DTLS. The name refers to the thirteen header bytes fed into the MAC; the tiny timing difference between padding lengths was enough to build a padding oracle, and the root cause was the protocol's old decision to use MAC-then-encrypt.
The standard advice for anyone avoiding CBC at the time was to switch to RC4. A few weeks later AlFardan, Paterson, Daniel J. Bernstein and others published a statistical attack recovering plaintext from RC4-encrypted TLS. With both exits closed, the move to AES-GCM sped up considerably.