Jason A. Donenfeld
More info
- Known for
- WireGuard, pass
- Handle
- zx2c4
The developer who gave Linux a VPN in a few thousand lines of code, in a field where the competition was measured in hundreds of thousands.
WireGuard was described in an NDSS 2017 paper and merged into Linux 5.6 in March 2020. Linus Torvalds had already called the code a work of art next to the horrors of OpenVPN and IPsec back in 2018. The design does no cipher negotiation at all: it is built on Noise, Curve25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305, and if anything needs changing, the protocol version changes.
He also wrote the pass password manager (2012), which is nothing more than GPG-encrypted files in a directory, and in 2022 took over maintenance of the kernel's random number generator, which he substantially rewrote.