Nadia Heninger

Heninger is known for her work on freezing powered-down security devices to slow their fading memories and allow their secrets to be recovered via a cold boot attack,[2][A] for her discovery that weak keys for the RSA cryptosystem are in widespread use by internet routers and other embedded devices,[3][B] for her research on how failures of forward secrecy in bad implementations of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange may have allowed the National Security Agency to decrypt large amounts of internet traffic via the Logjam vulnerability,[4][C] and for the DROWN attack, which uses servers supporting old and weak cryptography to decrypt traffic from modern clients to modern servers.

[5][D] Heninger's other research contributions include a variant of the RSA cryptosystem that would be secure against quantum computers,[6] an attack on implementations of the ANSI X9.31 cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator that use hard-coded seed keys to initialize the generator,[7] and the discovery of a side-channel attack against some versions of the libgcrypt cryptography library.

[8] In 2015, Heninger was part of a team of proponents that included Matt Blaze, Steven M. Bellovin, J. Alex Halderman, and Andrea M. Matwyshyn who successfully proposed a security research exemption to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

[9] Heninger graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science.

[10] She completed her doctorate in 2011 at Princeton University; her dissertation, Error Correction and the Cryptographic Key, was supervised by Bernard Chazelle.