Ian Goldberg

Ian Avrum Goldberg (born March 31, 1973) is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL (with David Wagner),cite newsgroup
author = Ian Goldberg
date = 1995-09-18
title = Netscape SSL implementation cracked!
newsgroup = hks.lists.cypherpunks
url = http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/my-posts/netscape-cracked-0
accessdate = 2006-09-12] and for his role as Chief Scientist of Radialpoint (formerly Zero-Knowledge Systems), a Canadian software company. Beginning with the fall 2006 academic term, Goldberg is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo.

Education

He attended high school at the University of Toronto Schools, graduating in 1991. In 1995, he received a B.Math from the University of Waterloo in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in December 2000. His thesis was entitled "A Pseudonymous Communications Infrastructure for the Internet". His advisor was Eric Brewer.

Accomplishments

As a high school student, Goldberg was a member of Canada's team to the International Math Olympiad from 1989 to 1991, where he received a bronze, silver, and gold medal respectively. In 1998, "Wired" Magazine chose him as a member of the "Wired 25"cite journal
title = The Wired 25
journal = Wired
volume = 6
issue = 11
date = 1998-11
url = http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/wired25.html
accessdate = 2006-10-30 ] .

Work in cryptography

In 1995, Ian Goldberg with David Wagner discovered a flaw in the random number generator used for temporary key generation in the SSL implementation of Netscape Navigator.

One of the first cryptanalyses on the WEP wireless encryption protocol was conducted by Goldberg with Nikita Borisov and David Wagner, revealing serious flaws in its design.cite paper
author = Nikita Borisov, Ian Goldberg, David Wagner
title = Intercepting Mobile Communications: The Insecurity of 802.11
date = 2001
url = http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/mobicom.pdf
format = PDF
accessdate = 2006-09-12]

Goldberg was a co-author of the Off-the-Record instant messaging encryption protocol. He is also the author of the Perl script given in "Cryptonomicon", a novel by Neal Stephenson.

See also

* Data privacy
* Information privacy

External links

* [http://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/ Ian Goldberg's homepage]

Notes and references