Solar Designer (Alexander Peslyak)
termsecurityprogramming
The Russian researcher behind John the Ripper, the password cracker that has been the standard auditing tool since 1996, and behind Openwall - along with early defensive work on non-executable stacks and the return-to-libc attack that showed why that defence alone is not enough.
He is the clearest example of a researcher who moves attack and defence in the same career: publishing the technique that defeats a mitigation, then shipping hardening that addresses it. He also runs the oss-security mailing list, which is where a large share of the open-source world's vulnerabilities are coordinated in public. Quiet, rigorous, and enormously influential without the conference-stage persona.
Also known as: john the ripper, openwall, return-to-libc, oss-security