Hilarie Orman
More info
- Known for
- Oakley (RFC 2412), RFC 3766
- Field
- Network security, cryptographic protocols
The cryptographer behind Oakley, the key exchange protocol that became one half of IKE and so sits inside every IPsec tunnel.
When IPsec was being standardised in the 1990s, it lacked a good way to agree on keys. Orman's Oakley, published as RFC 2412 in 1998, described how two parties perform an authenticated Diffie–Hellman exchange with selectable groups and forward secrecy. At the same time it was combined with ISAKMP and SKEME into IKE, RFC 2409. That IKE became notoriously convoluted is hard to pin on any one person; three protocols in one suit rarely look elegant.
In 2004 she co-wrote RFC 3766 with Paul Hoffman, on how large public keys must be to match a given symmetric key strength — a table that has been cited for two decades. She has also served as a programme manager at DARPA and been active in the IEEE security community.