Solar Designer
More info
- Name
- Alexander Peslyak
- Known for
- John the Ripper, Openwall, return-to-libc
Russian security developer behind the John the Ripper password cracker and the first public return-to-libc attack.
Alexander Peslyak, who goes by Solar Designer, released John the Ripper in 1996. It tries candidate passwords against hashes and became the standard way to show how weak a system's passwords really are — useful to attackers and to administrators who wanted to get there first. He also founded Openwall, with a hardened Linux distribution and kernel patches that made the stack non-executable.
In 1997 he showed that a non-executable stack isn't enough: instead of jumping to injected code, a buffer overflow can jump straight into existing library functions like system(). That was return-to-libc, the ancestor of the whole ROP family. He later co-designed yescrypt and wrote the bcrypt implementation many Linux systems ship.