Billy Brumley
A native Texan, Bill Brumley is a Kevin O'Sullivan Endowed Professor in Cybersecurity at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York, where he also serves as Director of Research for RIT's Global Cybersecurity Instutute (GCI). He received his doctorate from Aalto University (Helsinki, Finland) in 2012. He is a former Staff Engineer for Qualcomm's Product Security Initiative (QPSI) in San Diego, California. He is a 2018 European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant Laureate. Before joining RIT, he spent a decade as a Professor at Tampere University (Finland). He specializes in system security, cryptography engineering, and side-channel analysis.
Session
In a recent poll, OpenSSL Communities members were asked what technical features should be prioritized for upcoming OpenSSL releases. The results of the poll ranked constant-time BIGNUM as the second-most requested feature. This contrarian talk discusses the challenges of designing and implementing a truly constant-time arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic software library, why the cryptographer's mantra "just make it constant time" is a pipe dream, and radical alternative approaches that eschew this intrinsic limitation.