Nikita Borisov
More info
- Affiliation
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Known for
- OTR, the 2001 WEP attacks
Cryptographer who helped sink WEP and then built the OTR messaging protocol.
In 2001, with Ian Goldberg and David Wagner, he showed that WEP was broken in nearly every way it could be: reused IVs, a CRC an attacker could simply recompute, and no real integrity protection. The paper is a large part of why wireless encryption had to be redesigned from scratch.
Off-the-Record Messaging followed in 2004, co-written with Goldberg and Eric Brewer under the pointed subtitle "Why Not To Use PGP". The argument was that a chat should behave like a conversation: forward secrecy and deniability rather than signatures that bind you forever. Much of that thinking survives in the Signal Protocol. At UIUC he has since worked on anonymity systems, Tor included.