Ben Laurie

In the 1990s Laurie wrote Apache-SSL, bolting encryption onto Apache long before that was a given, and he was among the founders of the Apache Software Foundation. He spent years on the core team of OpenSSL. In 2004 he and Richard Clayton published "Proof-of-Work Proves Not to Work", which did the arithmetic and found that proof of work against spam would hurt ordinary users more than spammers.

At Google he developed Certificate Transparency with Adam Langley and Emilia Käsper, standardised as RFC 6962 in 2013. Every certificate is meant to appear in public, append-only logs, so a certificate authority that gets sloppy or gets fooled can no longer do so quietly. Chrome has required logging for all new certificates since 2018.