rpw's landing page

OK. Since you googled me, I might as well introduce myself...

My name is Ralf, some people choose to call me Ralf-Philipp. However, I will forever hate you if you do that. So foes: identify yourselves! Queue from the left, please. I've been living on the tubes, erhm.. sorry, internet I meant, for a long time, maybe before you were born even. Not always visible, but I was there...

At the moment I am finishing my my dissertation working in Prof. Johannes Buchmann's research group at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. You can find my academic home page over there as well.

My main interest these days revolve around cryptology - cryptanalysis in particular - as well as reverse code engineering, distributed computation and computer security in general. I maintain a blog on results I find meaningful in cryptanalysis. My personal blog is mostly used for rants, infrequent travel reports and other inanities.

Some of the stuff I have done in the past which may interest you:

• Many moons ago, before I started my studies at TUD, I co-authored a software called Rubberhose (a.k.a. Marutukku) for deniable filesystem encryption together with my friends Julian and Suelette. This software is no longer maintained (neither by us nor by anyone else as far as I know) though.
• In 2003, Kai Wirt and I looked into CSA, the Common Scrambling Algorithm used for bulk encryption of Pay-TV in Europe. Unfortunately its design turned out to be rather resistant. It is a combination of a highly-unbalanced UFN with 56 rounds and a rather weak stream cipher (see our paper). Kai later published a fault attack on CSA that you might also be interested in.
• at 23C3, Jacob Appelbaum and I presented an analysis of Apple's FileVault. David Hulton was our surprise guest, he had whipped up an FPGA-enhanced version of a passphrase cracker for FileVault literally within a night! Later we found that people were using the code we had published back then to decrypt the iPhone's root filesystem DMGs. We have now put the code on Google Code and merged the changes from the iphone-dev team (author of that change is unknown however): VileFault
• In early 2007, Erik Tews was looking for a Diplom thesis. I had just returned from a seminaire at Dagstuhl and was reminded of an attack on RC4 by Andreas Klein that we had heard a talk on two years ago. I spoke to Erik about it, Andrey gave input as well. Erik, Andrey and I came up with an extension of the attack, the result is a paper published at WISA 2007 which can also be freely found on IACR's ePrint archive. The aircrack-ptw code, written by Erik, has now been swallowed up by the aircrack-ng project, just like we intented. I hear it is being widely used from friends...

I am somewhat involved with the SAGE project, but I do not find the time I would like to devote helping them at the moment. Nonetheless, I try to advocate its use whenever I can. SAGE Days 6 sure was great fun!

Last but not least, I have lately turned into an avid user and subscriber of last.fm. Other than that, I totally enjoy a good coffee, Club Mate, travelling and good concerts!

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