Loren Kohnfelder invented what is today called public key infrastructure (PKI) in his May 1978

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

S.B. (BSCSE) thesis, which described a practical means of using public key cryptography to secure network communications. The Kohnfelder thesis introduced the terms ' certificate' and ' certificate revocation list' as well as introducing numerous other concepts now established as important parts of PKI. The

X.509 In cryptography, X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 certificates are used in many Internet protocols, including TLS/SSL, which is the basis for HTTPS, the secu ...

certificate specification that provides the basis for SSL,

S/MIME S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is a standard for public key encryption and signing of MIME data. S/MIME is on an IETF standards track and defined in a number of documents, most importantly . It was originally developed by R ...

and most modern PKI implementations are based on the Kohnfelder thesis."Certificates oh78, in Design Principles and Patterns for Computer Systems That Are Simultaneously Secure and Usable, Simson L. Garfinkel, PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 2005. p. 204. https://simson.net/thesis/ He was also the co-creator, with Praerit Garg, of the

STRIDE Stride or STRIDE may refer to: Computing * STRIDE (security), spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, elevation of privilege * Stride (software), a successor to the cloud-based HipChat, a corporate cloud-based ...

model of security threats, widely used in threat modeling. In 2021 he publishe
Designing Secure Software
with No Starch Press. He maintains
medium blog

References

External links

Kohnfelder, Loren M., Towards a Practical Public-Key Cryptosystem, May 1978.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kohnfelder, Loren Kohnfelder, Loren Living people Year of birth missing (living people)