David Wagner - Definition and Overview

David A. Wagner (born 1973/1974) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a well-known researcher in cryptography.

Wagner received an A.B. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1995, a M.S. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 2000.

Notable achievements include:

• 1996 Discovered a flaw in the implementation of SSL in Netscape Navigator (with Ian Goldberg).
• 1997 Cryptanalyzed the CMEA algorithm used in many US cellphones (with Bruce Schneier).
• 1998 Development of Twofish block cipher as a submission for NIST's AES competition (with Bruce Schneier, John Kelsey, Doug Whiting, Chris Hall, and Niels Ferguson).
• 1999 Invention of the slide attack, a new form of cryptanalysis (with Alex Biryukov); also the boomerang attack.
• 1999 Cryptanalysis of Microsoft's PPTP tunnelling protocol (with Bruce Schneier and "Mudge").
• 2000 Cryptanalysis of the A5/1 stream cipher used in GSM cellphones (with Alex Biryukov and Adi Shamir).
• 2001 Cryptanalysis of WEP, the security protocol used in 802.11 "WiFi" networks (with Nikita Borisov and Ian Goldberg).

External links

• Professor Wagner's home page (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/)
• Some of Wagner's publications (http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/w/Wagner:David.html)
• Popular Science biography / interview (http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,364614,00.html)