DANIEL J. BERNSTEIN

'Daniel Julius Bernstein' (sometimes known simply as 'djb'; born October 29, 1971) is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a mathematician, a cryptologist, and a programmer. Bernstein is the author of the computer software qmail, publicfile and djbdns. He has a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from New York University (1991), and a PhD in Mathematics from University of California, Berkeley (1995), studying under Hendrik Lenstra. He attended Bellport High School, a public high school on Long Island.
Bernstein brought the court case Bernstein v. United States. The ruling in the case declared software as protected speech under the First Amendment, and national restrictions on encryption software were overturned. Bernstein was originally represented by the EFF, but later represented himself despite having no formal training as a lawyer.
Bernstein has also proposed Internet Mail 2000, an alternative system for electronic mail, intended to replace Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Post Office Protocol (POP3) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
On Usenet and his website, Bernstein has publicly argued with Wietse Venema and Paul Vixie about software and security, with Matteo Frigo, author of FFTW, about FFT implementation and benchmarking, and with Bruce Schneier and Arjen Lenstra about computational cost.

Contents

Software security

Secure Software

Mathematics

References

See also

Further reading

External links

Software security

In the autumn of 2004, Bernstein began teaching one of the first formal university-level courses about computer software security, titled "UNIX Security Holes". The 16 members of the class discovered 91 new UNIX security holes. Bernstein, long a promoter of the idea that full disclosure is the best method to promote software security and founder of the securesoftware mailing list, publicly announced 44 of them with sample exploit code. This received some press attention and rekindled a debate over full disclosure.
Bernstein has recently explained that he is pursuing a strategy to "produce invulnerable computer systems". Bernstein plans to achieve this by putting the vast majority of computer software into an "extreme sandbox" that only allows it to transform input into output, and by writing bugfree replacements (like qmail and djbdns) for the remaining components that need additional privileges. He concludes: "I won’t be satisfied until I've put the entire security industry out of work."^[1]
As of Spring 2005, Bernstein was teaching a course on "High Speed Cryptography".^[2] Bernstein demonstrated new results against AES in the same time period.^[1]

Secure Software

Bernstein has written a number of a highly secure programs:

★ qmail

★ djbdns

★ ucspi-tcp

★ daemontools

★ publicfile
Amongst others.
Bernstein offers a security guarantee for qmail and djbdns; while there is a dispute over a reported potential qmail exploit, no functional exploits of any of these programs have been produced.^[4][5]

Mathematics

Bernstein is a prolific publisher of papers in mathematics and computation. Many of his papers introduce advances in the state of the art for algorithms or implementations. However, he's also a meticulous chronicler of previous advances, for instance his brief but encyclopaedic "Multidigit multiplication for mathematicians".^[1]
In 2001 Bernstein published "Circuits for integer factorization: a proposal,"^[1] which caused a stir as it potentially suggested that if physical hardware implementations could be close to their theoretical efficiency, then perhaps current views about how large numbers have to be before they are impractical to factor might be off by a factor of three. Thus as 512-digit RSA was then breakable, then perhaps 1536-bit RSA would be too. Bernstein was careful not to make any actual predictions, and emphasised the importance of correctly interpreting asymptotic expressions. However, several other important names in the field, Arjen Lenstra, Adi Shamir, Jim Tomlinson, and Eran Tromer disagreed strongly with Bernstein's conclusions.^[8] 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 of primegen, an asymptotically fast small prime sieve with low memory footprint based on the sieve of Atkin rather than the more usual sieve of Eratosthenes. Both have been used effectively to aid the search for large prime numbers.

References

1.
2. MCS 590, High-Speed Cryptography, Spring 2005 Daniel J. Bernstein
3.
4. Georgi Guninski security advisory #74, 2005 Georgi Guninski
5. My Take on Georgi Guninski's qmail Security Advisories James Craig Burley
6.
7.
8. Analysis of Bernstein's Factorization Circuit, Arjen K. Lenstra, Adi Shamir, Jim Tomlinson, and Eran Tromer, , , proc. Asiacrypt, 2002

See also

★ Salsa20, Poly1305-AES, Snuffle, cryptographic primitives designed by Bernstein.

★ Chain loading (which is sometimes known as ''Bernstein chaining'', due to Bernstein's extensive use of this technique)

★ QMQP

★ QMTP

★ ''Bernstein v. United States''

Further reading

★ MCS 494: UNIX Security Holes Daniel J. Bernstein

★ Students uncover dozens of Unix software flaws Robert Lemos

★ DJB Announces 44 Security Holes In
★ nix Software

External links

★ Official website

★ The DJB Way

★ DJBFFT

★ Daniel Bernstein's Profile at UIC