Paul Carl Kocher (born June 11, 1973) is an American

cryptographer Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

and

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

entrepreneur who founded

Cryptography Research Cryptography Research, Inc. is a San Francisco based cryptography company specializing in applied cryptographic engineering, including technologies for building tamper-resistant semiconductors. It was purchased on June 6, 2011 by Rambus for $342. ...

, Inc. (CRI) and served as its president and chief scientist.

Education and early life

Kocher grew up in

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

. He received a bachelor's degree in

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1995, where he worked part-time with

Martin Hellman Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his involvement with public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to th ...

. According to Hellman, Kocher is mostly self-taught in cryptography and already knew an amazing amount when they first met in Kocher's sophomore year. As demand for Kocher's knowledge in cryptography escalated, he gave up on his original plan to become a veterinarian and founded CRI instead.

Career and research

Kocher was awarded the 2019

Marconi Prize The Marconi Prize is an annual award recognizing achievements and advancements made in field of communications (radio, mobile, wireless, telecommunications, data communications, networks, and Internet). The prize is awarded by the Marconi Society a ...

with

Taher Elgamal Taher Elgamal (Arabic: طاهر الجمل) (born 18 August 1955) is an Egyptian cryptographer and entrepreneur. He has served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Security at Salesforce since 2013. Prior to that, he was the founder and CEO ...

for architecting the

Secure Sockets Layer Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...

(SSL) 3.0/

Transport Layer Security Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...

(TLS) 1.0 protocol, a cryptographic protocol for secure communications on the Internet. He pioneered the field of

side-channel attack In computer security, a side-channel attack is any attack based on extra information that can be gathered because of the fundamental way a computer protocol or algorithm is implemented, rather than flaws in the design of the protocol or algorit ...

s, including the development of

timing attack In cryptography, a timing attack is a side-channel attack in which the attacker attempts to compromise a cryptosystem by analyzing the time taken to execute cryptographic algorithms. Every logical operation in a computer takes time to execute, and ...

s that can break implementations of RSA, DSA and fixed-exponent Diffie–Hellman that operate in non-constant time, as well as the co-development of

power analysis Power analysis is a form of side channel attack in which the attacker studies the power consumption of a cryptographic hardware device. These attacks rely on basic physical properties of the device: semiconductor devices are governed by the l ...

and differential power analysis. His side-channel attack countermeasure designs are widely deployed in secure integrated circuits and other cryptographic devices. He has also worked on microprocessor security, and co-discovered and named the spectre vulnerability, which leverages speculative execution and other microprocessor performance optimizations to extract confidential information. He also helped architect security-related integrated circuits, including

Deep Crack In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to dec ...

, a

DES Des is a masculine given name, mostly a short form (hypocorism) of Desmond. People named Des include: People * Des Buckingham, English football manager * Des Corcoran, (1928–2004), Australian politician * Des Dillon (disambiguation), sever ...

brute-force key search machine.

Honors and awards

Kocher was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2009 for his contributions to cryptography and Internet security. He serves on the National Academies' Forum on Cyber Resilience. In 2018, Kocher was named a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research for "fundamental contributions to the study of side-channel attacks and countermeasures, cryptography in practice, and for service to the IACR." Kocher and

were jointly awarded the 2019

for "their development of SSL/ TLS and other contributions to the security of communications".

References

External links

*
Kocher's page on Rambus, Inc.'s site

Slashdot interview with Kocher
*
National Academies announcement

1973 births Living people Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Modern cryptographers Cypherpunks American cryptographers Stanford University alumni People from Oregon {{crypto-bio-stub