Niels Ferguson
Niels Ferguson (born December 10, 1965 in Eindhoven ) is a Dutch cryptographer . He currently works for Microsoft .
Ferguson was involved in the Skein hash algorithm , the Helix stream cipher and the WPA2 WLAN security standard . He also developed the random number generator Yarrow in 1999 together with Bruce Schneier and John Kelsey , which he later developed into Fortuna with Bruce Schneier. At the 2007 CRYPTO conference, he and Dan Shumow presented a document that highlighted a weakness in the controversial pseudo-random generator Dual_EC_DRBG specified by NIST .
AES / Rijndael weaknesses
Niels Ferguson helped develop the Twofish encryption algorithm , which was defeated in the final in the competition for the Advanced Encryption Standard . Shortly before the decision, Ferguson presented a representation of the later winning algorithm, Rijndael, as a relatively simple continued fraction. He explained this in a lecture at HAL 2001.
HDCP
In the same lecture at HAL, Ferguson claimed to have broken the HDCP copy protection system . However, he could not publish his results because he would then have to fear due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that he would no longer be able to travel to the USA. The HDCP master key appeared on the Internet nine years later.
Books
- Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier : Practical Cryptography. Wiley, Indianapolis IN 2003, ISBN 0-471-22357-3 (English)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bruce Schneier: Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? In: Wired.com. Condé Nast Digital, November 15, 2007, accessed October 21, 2010 .
- ↑ ftp://ftp.ccc.de/events/hal2001/video/hal2001_cryptoanalis_of_rijndael_48.mp4
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ferguson, Niels |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch cryptographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 10, 1965 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Eindhoven , Netherlands |