Nadia Heninger
More info
- Affiliation
- UC San Diego
- Known for
- Mining Your Ps and Qs, Logjam, the cold boot attack
Cryptographer who documents how real-world cryptography breaks — not on paper, but across millions of misconfigured devices on the internet.
In 2012 Heninger, Zakir Durumeric, Eric Wustrow and Alex Halderman scanned every TLS and SSH key on the internet. Their paper "Mining Your Ps and Qs" showed that many embedded devices generated RSA keys right after boot, before the random number generator had gathered any entropy. Keys sharing a prime factor fell to a simple gcd computation, and roughly half a percent of TLS hosts were exposed.
She was also an author of the 2008 cold boot paper and of Logjam in 2015, which showed that 1990s export-grade Diffie-Hellman could still be forced on modern servers. A recurring theme: old mistakes don't die, they just sit in firmware.