18 Facts About Moxie Marlinspike

Matthew Rosenfeld, better known by the pseudonym Moxie Marlinspike, is an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher.

Moxie Marlinspike is a former head of the security team at Twitter and the author of a proposed SSL authentication system replacement called Convergence.

Moxie Marlinspike previously maintained a cloud-based WPA cracking service and a targeted anonymity service called GoogleSharing.

Moxie Marlinspike began his career working for several technology companies, including enterprise infrastructure software maker BEA Systems Inc.

In 2010, Moxie Marlinspike was the chief technology officer and co-founder of Whisper Systems, an enterprise mobile security startup company.

The acquisition was done "primarily so that Mr Moxie Marlinspike could help the then-startup improve its security".

Moxie Marlinspike left Twitter in early 2013 and founded Open Whisper Systems as a collaborative open source project for the continued development of TextSecure and RedPhone.

Between 2014 and 2016, Moxie Marlinspike worked with WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google to integrate the Signal Protocol into their messaging services.

Moxie Marlinspike announced the release of a tool, sslstrip, that would automatically perform these types of man-in-the-middle attacks.

Moxie Marlinspike has discovered a number of different vulnerabilities in popular SSL implementations.

Also notably, Moxie Marlinspike presented a 2009 paper in which he introduced the concept of a null-prefix attack on SSL certificates.

Moxie Marlinspike revealed that all major SSL implementations failed to properly verify the Common Name value of a certificate, so that they could be tricked into accepting forged certificates by embedding null characters into the CN field.

In 2011, Moxie Marlinspike presented a talk, "SSL And The Future Of Authenticity", at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

Moxie Marlinspike outlined many of the problems with certificate authorities and announced the release of a software project called Convergence to replace them.

In 2013, Moxie Marlinspike published emails on his blog that he claimed were from Saudi Arabian telecom service Mobily soliciting his help in surveilling their customers, including intercepting communications running through various applications.

Moxie Marlinspike says that when flying within the United States he is unable to print his own boarding pass, is required to have airline ticketing agents make a phone call in order to issue one, and is subjected to secondary screening at TSA security checkpoints.

Originally from the state of Georgia, Moxie Marlinspike moved to San Francisco in the late 1990s at age 18.

The name Moxie Marlinspike is an assumed name partly derived from a childhood nickname.