Scott Fluhrer
More info
- Affiliation
- Cisco Systems
- Known for
- The FMS attack on RC4 and WEP
The Cisco cryptographer whose initial comes first in the FMS attack, the paper that turned WEP into a textbook example of how not to secure wireless.
Fluhrer was an engineer at Cisco rather than an academic when, in 2001, he published "Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4" with Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir. It showed that certain weak IVs leak key material into the first output byte of RC4. Since WEP simply glued a public IV onto the secret key, an attacker only had to listen long enough.
Within months tools like AirSnort were circulating, and the FMS attack became the reason WPA was rushed out. A year earlier Fluhrer and David McGrew had already documented statistical biases in RC4's keystream. He has since turned to hash-based signatures and co-authored RFC 8554, which specifies Leighton–Micali signatures.