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Matt Blaze

IRL Name: 
Matt Blaze
Biography: 

Matt Blaze is a researcher in the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania; he received his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University.

In 1993, Blaze published (with John Ioannidis) a paper presenting a protocol ("swIPe") that was to be one of the forerunners of IPsec. In 1994, he found a means to circumvent the wiretapping mechanisms of the Clipper chip, contributing to the death of this government-sponsored initiative. In 2003, he independently rediscovered a serious vulnerability in "master key" security in physical locks that was an open secret among locksmiths; his decision to disclose it publicly provoked controversy.

Facts

Blaze coined the term trust management to refer to the policy system which decides whether a particular entity should be permitted to carry out a particular action, and has provided foundation research in this area.

In 1994, he discovered a serious flaw in the US Government's "Clipper" encryption system, which had been proposed as a mechanism for the public to encrypt their data in a way that would still allow access by law enforcement.

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References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Blaze

http://www.crypto.com/research.html