Daniel Julius Bernstein (sometimes known as djb; born October 29, 1971) is an American
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
,
cryptologist, and
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
. He is a visiting professor at CASA at
Ruhr University Bochum
The Ruhr University Bochum (, ) is a public research university located in the southern hills of the central Ruhr area, Bochum, Germany. It was founded in 1962 as the first new public university in Germany after World War II. Instruction began in ...
, as well as a research professor of Computer Science at the
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a Public university, public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its campus is in the Near West Side, Chicago, Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus esta ...
. Before this, he was a professor ("
persoonlijk hoogleraar") in the department of mathematics and computer science at the
Eindhoven University of Technology
The Eindhoven University of Technology ( nl, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven), abbr. TU/e, is a public technical university in the Netherlands, located in the city of Eindhoven. In 2020–21, around 14,000 students were enrolled in its BSc a ...
.
Early life
Bernstein attended
Bellport High School
Bellport High School is the public high school for the South Country Central School District, which is located in Suffolk County, Long Island in the United States. It serves students in grades 9-12 in Bellport, East Patchogue, Brookhaven Hamle ...
, a public high school on
Long Island
Long Island is a densely populated island in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, part of the New York metropolitan area. With over 8 million people, Long Island is the most populous island in the United Sta ...
, graduating in 1987 at the age of 15. The same year, he ranked fifth in the
Westinghouse Science Talent Search
Westinghouse may refer to:
Businesses Current companies
*Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the company that manages the Westinghouse brand, with licensees:
**Westinghouse Electric Company, providing nuclear power-related services
**Westinghou ...
. In 1987 (at the age of 16), he achieved a Top 10 ranking in the
William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual list of mathematics competitions, mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in th ...
. Bernstein earned a B.A. in mathematics from
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
(1991) and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
(1995), where he studied under
Hendrik Lenstra.
''Bernstein v. United States''
The
export of cryptography from the United States was controlled as a munition starting from the Cold War until recategorization in 1996, with further relaxation in the late 1990s. In 1995, Bernstein brought the court case ''
Bernstein v. United States
''Bernstein v. United States'' is a set of court cases brought by Daniel J. Bernstein challenging restrictions on the export of cryptography from the United States.
History
The case was first brought in 1995, when Bernstein was a student at ...
''. The ruling in the case declared that software was
protected speech
Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The rights, right to freedom of expression has been ...
under the
First Amendment
First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1).
First or 1st may also refer to:
*World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement
Arts and media Music
* 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...
, which contributed to regulatory changes reducing controls on encryption. Bernstein was originally represented by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...
. He later represented himself.
Cryptography
Bernstein designed the
Salsa20 stream cipher
stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream (keystream). In a stream cipher, each plaintext digit is encrypted one at a time with the corresponding digit of the keystream ...
in 2005 and submitted it to
eSTREAM for review and possible standardization. He later published the
ChaCha20
Salsa20 and the closely related ChaCha are stream ciphers developed by Daniel J. Bernstein. Salsa20, the original cipher, was designed in 2005, then later submitted to the eSTREAM European Union cryptographic validation process by Bernstein. Ch ...
variant of Salsa in 2008. In 2005, he proposed the
elliptic curve
In mathematics, an elliptic curve is a smooth, projective, algebraic curve of genus one, on which there is a specified point . An elliptic curve is defined over a field and describes points in , the Cartesian product of with itself. If ...
Curve25519 as a basis for
public-key schemes. He worked as the lead researcher on the
Ed25519
In public-key cryptography, Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) is a digital signature scheme using a variant of Schnorr signature based on twisted Edwards curves.
It is designed to be faster than existing digital signature schemes ...
version of
EdDSA
In public-key cryptography, Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) is a digital signature scheme using a variant of Schnorr signature based on twisted Edwards curves.
It is designed to be faster than existing digital signature scheme ...
. The algorithms made their way into popular software. For example, since 2014, when
OpenSSH is compiled without
OpenSSL
OpenSSL is a software library for applications that provide secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping or need to identify the party at the other end. It is widely used by Internet servers, including the majority of HTT ...
they power most of its operations, and
OpenBSD
OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project em ...
package signing is based on Ed25519.
Nearly a decade later,
Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and su ...
disclosed mass surveillance by the
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...
, and researchers discovered a
backdoor
A back door is a door in the rear of a building. Back door may also refer to:
Arts and media
* Back Door (jazz trio), a British group
* Porta dos Fundos (literally “Back Door” in Portuguese) Brazilian comedy YouTube channel.
* Works so title ...
in the Agency's
Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm. These events raised suspicions of the elliptic curve parameters proposed by NSA and standardized by NIST. Many researchers feared that the NSA had chosen curves that gave them a
cryptanalytic advantage.
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
selected ChaCha20 along with Bernstein's
Poly1305 message authentication code
In cryptography, a message authentication code (MAC), sometimes known as a ''tag'', is a short piece of information used for authenticating a message. In other words, to confirm that the message came from the stated sender (its authenticity) and ...
for use in
TLS
TLS may refer to:
Computing
* Transport Layer Security, a cryptographic protocol for secure computer network communication
* Thread level speculation, an optimisation on multiprocessor CPUs
* Thread-local storage, a mechanism for allocating vari ...
, which is widely used for Internet security.
Many protocols based on his works have been adopted by various standards organizations and are
used in a variety of applications, such as
Apple iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
, the
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
kernel,
OpenSSH, and
Tor
Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to:
Places
* Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain
* Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city
* Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano
* Tor Bay, Devon, England
* Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia
Sc ...
.
In spring 2005, Bernstein taught a course on "high speed cryptography." He introduced new attacks against implementations of
AES
AES may refer to:
Businesses and organizations Companies
* AES Corporation, an American electricity company
* AES Data, former owner of Daisy Systems Holland
* AES Eletropaulo, a former Brazilian electricity company
* AES Andes, formerly AES Gener ...
(
cache attacks) in the same time period.
In April 2008, Bernstein's
stream cipher
stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream (keystream). In a stream cipher, each plaintext digit is encrypted one at a time with the corresponding digit of the keystream ...
"
Salsa20" was selected as a member of the final portfolio of the
eSTREAM project, part of a
European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...
research directive.
In 2011, Bernstein published RFSB, a variant of the
Fast Syndrome Based Hash
In cryptography, the fast syndrome-based hash functions (FSB) are a family of cryptographic hash functions introduced in 2003 by Daniel Augot, Matthieu Finiasz, and Nicolas Sendrier.
Unlike most other cryptographic hash functions in use today, ...
function.
He is one of the editors of the 2009 book ''Post-Quantum Cryptography''.
Software
Starting in the mid-1990s, Bernstein has written a number of security-aware programs, including
qmail
qmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that runs on Unix. It was written, starting December 1995, by Daniel J. Bernstein as a more secure replacement for the popular Sendmail program. Originally license-free software, qmail's source code was ...
,
ezmlm
ezmlm is mailing list management software (MLM) by Daniel J. Bernstein. It is similar to GNU Mailman and Majordomo but only works with the qmail mail transfer agent. It is released into the public domain. The latest version, 0.53, came out in 1 ...
,
djbdns
The djbdns software package is a DNS implementation. It was created by Daniel J. Bernstein in response to his frustrations with repeated security holes in the widely used BIND DNS software. As a challenge, Bernstein offered a $1000 prize for the ...
,
ucspi-tcp
ucspi-tcp is a public domain Unix TCP command-line tool for building TCP client-server applications. It consists of super-server ''tcpserver'' and ''tcpclient'' application.
Fro"Life with qmail" Dave Sill, 2 January 200 ''ucspi-tcp'' is an ac ...
,
daemontools
daemontools is a process supervision toolkit written by Daniel J. Bernstein as an alternative to other system initialization and process supervision tools, such as Init.
Some of the features of daemontools are:
* Easy service installation and ...
, and publicfile.
Bernstein criticized the leading
DNS
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...
package at the time,
BIND, and wrote djbdns as a DNS package with security as a primary goal. Bernstein offers "security guarantees" for qmail and djbdns in the form of monetary rewards for the identification of flaws. A purported exploit targeting qmail running on 64-bit platforms was published in 2005, but Bernstein believes that the exploit does not fall within the parameters of his qmail security guarantee. In March 2009, Bernstein awarded $1000 to
Matthew Dempsky for finding a security flaw in
djbdns
The djbdns software package is a DNS implementation. It was created by Daniel J. Bernstein in response to his frustrations with repeated security holes in the widely used BIND DNS software. As a challenge, Bernstein offered a $1000 prize for the ...
.
In August 2008, Bernstein announced
DNSCurve
DNSCurve is a proposed secure protocol for the Domain Name System (DNS), designed by Daniel J. Bernstein.
Description
DNSCurve uses Curve25519 elliptic curve cryptography to establish keys used by Salsa20, paired with the message authentication ...
, a proposal to secure the
Domain Name System
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...
. DNSCurve applies techniques from
elliptic curve cryptography
Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. ECC allows smaller keys compared to non-EC cryptography (based on plain Galois fields) to provide e ...
to provide a vast increase in performance over the
RSA public-key algorithm used by
DNSSEC
The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) are a suite of extension specifications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing data exchanged in the Domain Name System (DNS) in Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The protocol ...
. It uses the existing DNS hierarchy to propagate trust by embedding public keys into specially formatted, backward-compatible DNS records.
Bernstein proposed
Internet Mail 2000
Internet Mail 2000 is an Internet mail architecture proposed by Daniel J. Bernstein (and in subsequent years separately proposed by several others), designed with the precept that the initial storage of mail messages be the responsibility of the ...
, an alternative system for electronic mail, intended to replace the
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the
Post Office Protocol (POP3) and the
Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
Bernstein is also known for his
string hashing function ''djb2'' and the
cdb database library.
Mathematics
Bernstein has published a number of papers on
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
and
computation
Computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that follows a well-defined model (e.g., an algorithm).
Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historically, people) that perform computations are known as ''computers''. An es ...
. Many of his papers deal with
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
s or implementations.
In 2001, Bernstein circulated "Circuits for
integer factorization
In number theory, integer factorization is the decomposition of a composite number into a product of smaller integers. If these factors are further restricted to prime numbers, the process is called prime factorization.
When the numbers are suf ...
: a proposal," which suggested that, if physical hardware implementations could be brought close to their theoretical efficiency, the then-popular estimates of adequate security parameters might be off by a factor of three. Since 512-bit
RSA was breakable at the time, so might be 1536-bit RSA. Bernstein was careful not to make any actual predictions, and emphasized the importance of correctly interpreting
asymptotic
In analytic geometry, an asymptote () of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the ''x'' or ''y'' coordinates tends to infinity. In projective geometry and related contexts, ...
expressions. Several prominent researchers (among them
Arjen Lenstra,
Adi Shamir, Jim Tomlinson, and Eran Tromer) disagreed strongly with Bernstein's conclusions. Bernstein has received funding to investigate whether this potential can be realized.
Bernstein is also the author of the mathematical
libraries DJBFFT, a fast portable
FFT library, and primegen, an asymptotically fast small prime
sieve with low memory footprint based on the
sieve of Atkin In mathematics, the sieve of Atkin is a modern algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to a specified integer. Compared with the ancient sieve of Eratosthenes, which marks off multiples of primes, the sieve of Atkin does some preliminary work a ...
(rather than the more usual
sieve of Eratosthenes
In mathematics, the sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit.
It does so by iteratively marking as composite (i.e., not prime) the multiples of each prime, starting with the first prime n ...
). Both have been used effectively in the search for large
prime number
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...
s.
In 2007, Bernstein proposed the use of a
(twisted) Edwards curve,
Curve25519, as a basis for
elliptic curve cryptography
Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. ECC allows smaller keys compared to non-EC cryptography (based on plain Galois fields) to provide e ...
; it is employed in Ed25519 implementation of
EdDSA
In public-key cryptography, Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) is a digital signature scheme using a variant of Schnorr signature based on twisted Edwards curves.
It is designed to be faster than existing digital signature scheme ...
.
In February 2015, Bernstein and others published a paper on stateless post-quantum
hash-based signatures, called SPHINCS.
In April 2017, Bernstein and others published a paper on Post-Quantum RSA that includes an integer factorization algorithm claimed to be "often much faster than
Shor's".
[https://cr.yp.to/papers/pqrsa-20170419.pdf ]
Teaching
In 2004, Bernstein taught a course on
computer software security where he assigned each student to find ten
vulnerabilities
Vulnerability refers to "the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally."
A window of vulnerability (WOV) is a time frame within which defensive measures are diminished, com ...
in published software.
The 25 students discovered 44 vulnerabilities, and the class published security advisories about the issues.
See also
*
CubeHash
CubeHash is a cryptographic hash function submitted to the NIST hash function competition by Daniel J. Bernstein. CubeHash has a 128 byte state, uses wide pipe construction, and is ARX based. Message blocks are XORed into the initial bits of a ...
, Bernstein's submission to the
NIST hash function competition
*
SipHash
*
NaCl (Software), a Networking and Cryptography library
*
Quick Mail Queuing Protocol
Quick Mail Queuing Protocol (QMQP) is a network protocol designed to share e-mail queues between several hosts. It was designed and implemented by Daniel J. Bernstein in qmail
qmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that runs on Unix. It wa ...
(QMQP)
*
Quick Mail Transport Protocol
The Quick Mail Transfer Protocol (QMTP) is an e-mail transmission Communications protocol, protocol that is designed to have better performance than Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the ''de facto'' standard. It was designed and implemented b ...
(QMTP)
References
External links
*
DJBFFTDaniel Bernstein on the Faculty Page at UICFaculty page at Eindhoven University of Technology*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bernstein, Daniel J.
1971 births
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences alumni
Living people
Modern cryptographers
American computer programmers
American people of German-Jewish descent
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni
Computer security academics
University of Illinois Chicago faculty
Computer science educators
Eindhoven University of Technology faculty
Open content activists
People from East Patchogue, New York