Matt Blaze (@mattblaze) is a professor in the computer science department at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1992 until he joined Penn in 2004, he was a research scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories. His research focuses on the architecture and design of secure systems based on cryptographic techniques, analysis of secure systems against practical attack models, and on finding new cryptographic primitives and techniques. 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. He has testified before various committees of the US Congress and European Parliament several times, providing technical perspective on the problems surrounding law enforcement and intelligence access to communications traffic and computer data. He is especially interested in the use of encryption to protect insecure systems such as the Internet. Recently, he has applied cryptologic techniques to other areas, including the analysis of physical security systems; this work yielded a powerful and practical attack against virtually all commonly used master-keyed mechanical locks.

Twitter: @mattblaze