Daniel Julius Bernstein is a German-American mathematician, cryptologist, and programmer. He is a Personal professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, as well as a Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In the mid-1990s security was not a primary design concern in internet software development and cryptography was subject to strict export controls. Bernstein attempted to address this situation by designing and implementing secure email and DNS services and by suing the United States Government in 1995 . His software received significant attention and no bugs were found in it for eight years despite the monetary rewards he offered for them . Bernstein was merciless in his criticism of the leading email and DNS packages of the time, Sendmail and BIND, both supported by large teams of programmers and widely distributed.
Bernstein's qmail, publicfile, and djbdns packages were released as license-free software and, for this reason, were not included in certain open-source Linux distributions despite the fact that they were used internally by their development teams. This issue was resolved when Bernstein released the source code of his projects into the public domain in 2007.
Bernstein designed the Salsa20 stream cipher in 2005 and submitted it to eSTREAM for review and possible standardization. A closely related stream cipher, ChaCha20, was published by him in 2008. He also proposed the elliptic curve Curve25519 as a basis for public-key schemes in 2005, and worked as the lead researcher on the Ed25519 version of EdDSA.
Nearly a decade later Edward Snowden's disclosure of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and the discovery of a backdoor in their Dual_EC_DRBG, 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 an cryptanalytic advantage. Since then, Curve25519 and EdDSA have attracted much greater attention. Google has also selected ChaCha20 along with Bernstein's Poly1305 message authentication code for use in TLS, which is widely used for Internet security. Many protocols based on his works have now been adopted by various standards organizations and are used in a variety of applications, such as Apple iOS, the Linux kernel, OpenSSH, and Tor.
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29. October 1971
