Phillip Hallam-Baker
British security architect who went from CERN's early web crowd to the certificate business, and wrote the standard for CAA records.
Hallam-Baker was at CERN in the early 1990s, sketching security for HTTP before the web had any users worth protecting. He later became principal scientist at VeriSign and contributed to the XML security standards around SAML, XKMS and WS-Security — the era when everything was supposed to be signed XML.
As a scientist at the certificate authority Comodo he co-wrote RFC 6844 (2013) with Rob Stradling, defining CAA: a DNS record in which a domain owner names the CAs allowed to issue certificates for it. Checking it has been mandatory for every public CA since 2017. In 2008 he published The dotCrime Manifesto, arguing that online crime should be fought with infrastructure rather than user education.