Nate Lawson
The security consultant who helped design Blu-ray's copy protection, found timing leaks in other people's crypto libraries and challenged Joanna Rutkowska to a hypervisor duel.
At Paul Kocher's Cryptography Research, Lawson helped design BD+ — a scheme in which every Blu-ray disc carries a small program that runs in a virtual machine inside the player and can patch a compromised key chain after the fact. He later founded Root Labs, specialising in embedded systems and side channels. In 2009 he showed that Google's Keyczar compared HMAC values byte by byte and bailed out at the first mismatch, leaking the right answer through response time.
In 2007, with Thomas Ptacek and Peter Ferrie, he challenged Rutkowska's claim that a virtualisation rootkit like Blue Pill was undetectable, proposing a contest on real machines. It never took place: the two sides could not agree on terms.