Niels Ferguson
More info
- Affiliation
- Counterpane, Microsoft
- Known for
- Twofish, Skein, Fortuna, Elephant diffuser, the Dual_EC warning
Dutch cryptographer from the Schneier circle who in 2007 pointed out where an NSA backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG could live — six years before Snowden confirmed it.
Ferguson was on the team behind Twofish in 1998 and Skein a decade later, and with Bruce Schneier wrote Practical Cryptography (2003), the book that taught a generation of developers that the algorithm is rarely the problem. It also introduced the Fortuna random number generator and the Horton principle. He designed Michael too, the integrity code in WPA's TKIP — deliberately weak, because it had to run on old network cards with next to no processing power.
At Microsoft he built the Elephant diffuser for BitLocker. At CRYPTO 2007 he and Dan Shumow showed in a short talk that whoever chose the constants in Dual_EC_DRBG could predict its output. NIST only advised against the standard in 2013.