Josh Aas

Aas came out of Mozilla, where he had worked on the Gecko engine, and in 2013 co-founded the Internet Security Research Group. Its project became Let's Encrypt, which opened to the public in December 2015 and, through ACME, turned certificates from something a human pays for and forgets to renew into something a cron job handles. Within a few years encrypted page loads went from minority to norm.

His next project, Prossimo, funds rewrites of critical infrastructure in Rust — sudo, NTP, TLS libraries — on the argument that roughly two-thirds of serious vulnerabilities are memory bugs a memory-safe language would never have let through. Same playbook as before: find the problem everyone complains about and make it cheaper to stop having it.