Dr. Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen, Cryptographer

E-Mail: mjos (at) iki (dot) fi
Mobile: +358 (Finland) 41 7745320 ..or.. +1 (US) 214 906 5889
PGP / GnuPG: mjos.pgp.asc.

Welcome to my home page. This is a place where I keep preprints (and occasionally some other junk) available.

I'm a cryptomathematician and an information security generalist. Most of my work revolves around cryptographic R & D, software development and other security consulting (I've been a PENTEST specialist and a PCI DSS QSA, among other things). After I started with SSH Communications Security back in 1997, I've worked for Nokia Research, NIXU Middle East, and several startup companies.

Nowadays I work for Revere Security of Texas. This means cryptanalysis and cryptosystem design stuff -- but I am a security code monkey too. I like to marry "bare metal" engineering with deep mathematics in my work.

I did my Ph.D. in Information Security few years ago with ISG, Royal Holloway, University of London. Here's my thesis: Cryptanalysis of Dedicated Cryptographic Hash Functions and mathematical genealogy. My Erdős number is 3. I also have a M.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Jyväskylä in Finland. I've authored some 30 publications, most of them on cryptanalysis.

Cheers,
- Markku (11-Apr-12)

Recent Publications

The BLUEJAY Ultra-Lightweight Hybrid Cryptosystem
TrustED 2012, 24-25 May 2012, San Francisco. To appear.

Cycling Attacks on GCM, GHASH and Other Polynomial MACs and Hashes
FSE 2012, 19-21 March 2012, Washington DC. To appear.

Practical attack on 8 rounds of the lightweight block cipher KLEIN
With J.-P. Aumasson and M. Naya-Plasencia.
INDOCRYPT 2011, 11-14 December 2011, Chennai India. To appear.

Cryptographic Analysis of All 4 x 4-Bit S-Boxes
SAC 2011, LNCS 7118, pp. 118-133, 2011.

The Hummingbird-2 Lightweight Authenticated Encryption Algorithm
With D. Engels, P. Schweitzer, and E. M. Smith.
RFIDSec 2011, LNCS 7055, pp. 19-31, 2011.

Cryptanalysis of Hummingbird-1
FSE 2011, LNCS 6733, pp. 328-341, 2011.

Selected

The PASSERINE Public Key Encryption and Authentication Mechanism
NORDSEC 2010, LNCS 7127, pp. 283-288, 2010.

Project TWOVAULT - Secure and Selectively Deniable Data Storage
ISCTURKEY 2008.

A Meet-in-the-Middle Collision Attack Against the New Fork-256
INDOCRYPT 2007, LNCS 4859, pp. 10-17, 2007.

Linearization Attacks Against Syndrome Based Hashes
INDOCRYPT 2007, LNCS 4859, pp. 1-9, 2007.

Security VSH in the Real World
INDOCRYPT 2006, LNCS 4329. pp. 95-103, 2006.

LASH
With K. Bentahar, D. Page, J.H. Silverman, and N.P. Smart.
Second NIST Hash Workshop, 2006.

Chosen-IV Statistical Attacks Against eSTREAM Ciphers
SECRYPT 2006.

Encrypted Watermarks and Linux Laptop Security
WISA 2004, LNCS 3325, pp. 30-41, 2004.

Cryptanalysis of Block Ciphers Based on SHA-1 and MD5
FSE 2003, LNCS 2887, pp. 36-44, 2003.

A Time-Memory Tradeoff Attack Against LILI-128
FSE 2002, LNCS 2365, pp. 231-236, 2002.

Attacks against the WAP WTLS protocol
CMS '99, IFIP 152 (Kluwer), pp. 209-215, 1999.

Misc. things

SGCM: The Sophie Germain Counter Mode
IACR ePrint 2011/326. June 2011.

Method and apparatus for improved pseudo-random generation
US Patent 7,007,050, 28 February 2006.

Weakness of the OpenSSL PRNG in Versions Up To OpenSSL 0.9.6.a
OpenSSL Security Advisory, 10 July 2001.

A Note Regarding the Hash Function Use of MARS and RC6
Official Federal Comment on AES for NIST, 14 April 1999.

Cryptanalysis of Block Tea
Unpublished manuscript, 20 October 1998.