Nick Sullivan

Sullivan led cryptography work at Cloudflare and was behind Keyless SSL (2014), in which banks and other touchy customers keep their private keys on their own key server while Cloudflare handles the rest of the handshake. It solved a practical deadlock: for many customers, handing a private key to a CDN was a non-starter.

He went on to help drive Privacy Pass, which lets a user prove they solved a captcha without becoming trackable; Encrypted Client Hello, which hides which site you are connecting to; and early post-quantum key exchange experiments in TLS 1.3 with Google. The common thread: put the crypto where the traffic already flows, not in a separate tool nobody installs.