Markus Guenther Kuhn (born 1971) is a German

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, currently working at the

Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. it employed 56 faculty members, 45 support staff, 105 research staff, and about 205 researc ...

and a fellow of

Wolfson College, Cambridge Wolfson College () is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The majority of students at the college are postgraduates. The college also admits "mature" undergraduates (aged 21 and above), with around ...

Education

Kuhn was educated at

University of Erlangen A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

(Germany), he received his Master of Science degree at

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

and PhD at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

Research

Kuhn's main research interests include

computer security Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and computer network, n ...

, in particular the hardware and signal-processing aspects of it, and

distributed system Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commun ...

s. He is known, among other things, for his work on security microcontrollers, compromising emanations, and

distance-bounding protocol Distance bounding protocols are cryptographic protocols that enable a verifier V to establish an upper bound on the physical distance to a prover P. They are based on timing the delay between sending out challenge bits and receiving back the corre ...

s. He developed the Stirmark test for

digital watermarking A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio, video or image data.H.T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar and A.N. Akansu: ''Data Hiding Fundamentals and Applications: Content Security in Digital Multimedia'' ...

schemes, the

OTPW OTPW is a one-time password system developed for authentication in Unix-like operating systems by Markus Kuhn. A user's real password is not directly transmitted across the network. Rather, a series of one-time passwords is created from a short s ...

one-time password system, and headed the project that extended the

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

misc-fixed ''misc-fixed'' is a collection of monospace bitmap fonts that is distributed with the X Window System. It is a set of independent bitmap fonts which—apart from all being sans-serif fonts—cannot be described as belonging to a single font famil ...

fonts to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. In 1994, as an undergraduate student, he became known for developing several ways to circumvent the

VideoCrypt VideoCrypt is a cryptographic, smartcard-based conditional access television encryption system that scrambles analogue pay-TV signals. It was introduced in 1989 by News Datacom and was used initially by Sky TV and subsequently by several other ...

encryption system, most notably the ''Season7'' smartcard emulator. In 2002, he published a new method for eavesdropping CRT screens and in 2003 he went on to publish mitigations such as "Tempest fonts". In 2010, Kuhn was asked to analyse the

ADE 651 The ADE 651 is a fraudulent bomb detector produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). It was claimed to detect many substances, such as drugs or explosives, from long distances. The device was sold ...

, a device used in Iraq that was said to be a bomb-detecting device; he found that it contained nothing but an anti-theft tag and said that it was "impossible" that the device could detect anything whatsoever. He is also known for some of his work on international standardisation, such as pioneering the introduction of

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

under

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Awards and honours

In 1987 and 1988, he won the German national computer-science contest, and in 1989, he won a gold medal for the West German team at the

International Olympiad in Informatics The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual competitive programming competition and one of the International Science Olympiads Student competition, for secondary school students. The first IOI was held in 1989 in Pravetz, Bulgar ...

.Results of the IOI 1989

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kuhn, Markus 1971 births Living people German computer scientists Purdue University alumni Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge Members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Computer security academics Studienstiftung alumni University of Erlangen–Nuremberg alumni Scientists from Munich Alumni of the University of Cambridge