About the Authors

Niels Ferguson has spent his entire career working as a cryptographic engineer. After studying mathematics in Eindhoven, he worked for DigiCash analyzing, designing, and implementing advanced electronic payment systems that protect the privacy of the user. Later he worked as a cryptographic consultant for Counterpane and MacFergus, analyzing hundreds of systems and designing dozens. He was part of the team that designed the Twofish block cipher, performed some of the best initial analysis of AES, and co-designed the encryption system currently used by WiFi. Since 2004 he works at Microsoft where he helped design and implement the BitLocker disk encryption system. He currently works in the Windows cryptography team that is responsible for the cryptographic implementations in Windows and other Microsoft products.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, referred to by The Economist as a “security guru.” He is the author of eight books—including the best sellers Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World, Secrets and Lies, and Applied Cryptography—as well as hundreds of articles and essays in national and international publications, and many more academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram, and his blog Schneier on Security, are read by over 250,000 people. He is a frequent guest on television and radio, and is regularly quoted in the press on issues surrounding security and privacy. He has testified before Congress on multiple occasions, and has served on several government technical committees. Schneier is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT.

Tadayoshi Kohno (Yoshi) is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on improving the security and privacy properties of current and future technologies. He conducted the initial security analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine source code in 2003, and has since turned his attention to securing emerging technologies ranging from wireless implantable pacemakers and defibrillators to cloud computing. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2007 he was awarded the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award for his work in applied cryptography, recognizing him as one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of California at San Diego.

Niels, Bruce, and Yoshi are part of the team that designed the Skein hash function, one of the competitors in NIST's SHA-3 competition.