Jann Horn
More info
- Affiliation
- Google, Project Zero
- Known for
- Spectre, Meltdown, Linux kernel vulnerabilities
The Project Zero researcher who found both Spectre and Meltdown on his own in 2017, in parallel with several academic teams.
Horn was fairly new at Google's Project Zero when, in June 2017, he told Intel, AMD and ARM that their processors' speculative execution leaked data that should have been off limits. Independently, Daniel Gruss's group in Graz and Paul Kocher had reached the same conclusion. The results went public in January 2018 as Spectre and Meltdown, and his name is on both.
Beyond that he has found a long list of bugs in the Linux kernel, often subtle races and lifetime errors that end in privilege escalation. His reports are known for arriving with a working proof of concept and an explanation shorter than you would expect.