![Solar designer](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Solar_designer.jpg)
Alexander Peslyak (Александр Песляк) (born 1977), better known as Solar Designer, is a security specialist from Russia. He is best known for his publications on exploitation techniques, including the
return-to-libc attack
A "return-to-libc" attack is a computer security attack usually starting with a buffer overflow in which a subroutine return address on a call stack is replaced by an address of a subroutine that is already present in the process executable memory ...
and the first
generic heap-based buffer overflow exploitation technique, as well as
computer security
Computer security, cybersecurity (cyber security), or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attack by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, t ...
protection techniques such as
privilege separation
In computer programming and computer security, privilege separation is one software-based technique for implementing the principle of least privilege. With privilege separation, a program is divided into parts which are limited to the specific pri ...
for
daemon
Daimon or Daemon (Ancient Greek: , "god", "godlike", "power", "fate") originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and Hell ...
processes.
Peslyak is the author of the widely popular
password cracking tool
John the Ripper
John the Ripper is a free password cracking software tool. Originally developed for the Unix operating system, it can run on fifteen different platforms (eleven of which are architecture-specific versions of Unix, DOS, Win32, BeOS, and OpenVMS) ...
. His code has also been used in various third-party operating systems, such as
OpenBSD and
Debian.
Work
Peslyak has been the founder and leader of the
Openwall Project
The Openwall Project is a source for various software, including Openwall GNU/*/Linux (Owl), a security-enhanced Linux distribution designed for servers. Openwall patches and security extensions have been included into many major Linux distribut ...
since 1999. He is the founder of Openwall, Inc. and has been the CTO since 2003. He served as an advisory board member at the Open Source Computer Emergency Response Team (oCERT) from 2008 until oCERT's conclusion in August 2017. He also co-founded oss-security.
He has spoken at many international conferences, including
FOSDEM
Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and ...
and CanSecWest. He wrote the foreword to
Michał Zalewski's 2005 book ''Silence on the Wire''.
Alexander received the 2009 "Lifetime Achievement Award" during the annual
Pwnie Award at the
Black Hat Security Conference. In 2015
Qualys
Qualys, Inc. provides cloud security, compliance and related services and is based in Foster City, California. Qualys provides vulnerability management solutions using a "software as a service" (SaaS) model. It has added cloud-based compliance a ...
acknowledged his help with the disclosure of a
GNU C Library
The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by ...
gethostbyname
function buffer overflow ().
See also
*
Security-focused operating system
This is a list of operating systems specifically focused on security. Operating systems for general-purpose usage may be secure without having a specific focus on security.
Similar concepts include security-evaluated operating systems that have ...
References
External links
Openwall Project home pageSolar Designer's pseudo homepage* http://phrack.org/issues/69/2.html#article
{{Linux people
People associated with computer security
1977 births
Living people