David Brumley

Who is David Brumley?

David Brumley is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a well-known researcher in software security, network security, and applied cryptography. Prof. Brumley also worked for 5 years as a Computer Security Officer for Stanford University.

Some of his notable accomplishments include:

In 2008, he showed the counter-intuitive principle that patches can help attackers. In particular, he showed that given a patch for a bug and the originally buggy program, a working exploit can be automatically generated in as little as a few seconds. This result shows that current patch distribution architectures that distribute patches on time-scales larger than a few seconds are potentially insecure. In particular, this work shows one of the first applications of constraint satisfaction to generating exploits.

In 2007, he developed techniques for automatically inferring implementation bugs in protocol implementations. This work won the best paper award at the USENIX Security conference.

His work on a Timing attack against RSA. The work was able to recover the factors of a 1024-bit RSA private key over a network in about 2 hours. This work also won the USENIX Security Best Paper award. As a result of this work, OpenSSL, stunnel, and others now implement defenses such as RSA blinding.