Eric Rescorla
More info
- Nickname
- EKR
- Known for
- Editor of TLS 1.3, DTLS, Let's Encrypt
- Spec
- RFC 8446
The man whose name stands alone on RFC 8446 — the specification for TLS 1.3.
Rescorla, known around the IETF simply as EKR, wrote SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems in 2001 and has been one of the people actually shaping the protocols ever since. In 2006 came DTLS, TLS adapted for datagrams, and in 2010 he led the fix for the renegotiation bug in RFC 5746. In 2007 he took part in California's source-code review of its voting machines, which found roughly as much as the pessimists had predicted.
His largest work is TLS 1.3, published in 2018 after four years and 28 drafts: fewer round trips, no static RSA key exchange, and a clear-out of cipher options that had lingered through sheer inertia. He also co-founded Let's Encrypt and served as CTO of Firefox at Mozilla, giving him a hand in both the protocol and its biggest client.