djb
Daniel Julius Bernstein (sometimes known simply as djb; born October 29, 1971) is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a mathematician, a cryptologist, and a programmer. Bernstein is the author of the computer software qmail, publicfile and djbdns. He has a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from New York University (1991), and a PhD in Mathematics from University of California, Berkeley (1995), studying under Hendrik Lenstra.
Bernstein brought the court case Bernstein v. United States. The ruling in the case declared software as protected speech under the First Amendment, and national restrictions on encryption software were overturned. Bernstein was originally represented by the EFF, but later represented himself despite having no formal training as a lawyer.
In the autumn of 2004, Bernstein taught a course about computer software security, titled "UNIX Security Holes". The 16 members of the class discovered 91 new UNIX security holes. Bernstein, long a promoter of the idea that full disclosure is the best method to promote software security and founder of the securesoftware mailing list, publicly announced 44 of them with sample exploit code. This received some press attention and rekindled a debate over full disclosure.
Bernstein has recently explained that he is pursuing a strategy to "produce invulnerable computer systems". Bernstein plans to achieve this by putting the vast majority of computer software into an "extreme sandbox" that only allows it to transform input into output, and by writing bugfree replacements (like qmail and djbdns) for the remaining components that need additional privileges. He concludes: "I won’t be satisfied until I've put the entire security industry out of work."
In spring 2005 Bernstein taught a course on "High Speed Cryptography". Bernstein demonstrated new results against implementations of AES (cache attacks) in the same time period.
