Daniel J. Bernstein
| Daniel J. Bernstein | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
October 29, 1971 East Patchogue, New York |
| Nationality | American, German |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Chicago, Eindhoven University of Technology |
| Alma mater |
University of California, Berkeley New York University |
| Doctoral advisor | Hendrik Lenstra |
| Known for | qmail, djbdns, Curve25519 |
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Website cr |
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Daniel Julius Bernstein (sometimes known simply as djb; born October 29, 1971) is a German-Americanmathematician, cryptologist, programmer, and professor of mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology and research professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In the mid 90's internet software was not designed for security, and cryptography was controlled. Bernstein addressed cryptography by suing the United States Government in 1995 Bernstein v. United States and by writing secure software for email, web, and DNS. The software came with a security guarantee that achieved significant status during the 8 years where no bugs were found. Bernstein was merciless in his criticism of then leading email (Sendmail) and dns (Bind) software packages and both the large teams which supported them and people that distributed them. Sendmail and Bind where both significantly less efficient, more difficult to configure and bug prone by design resulting in a regular flow of significant bugs.
His computer software programs qmail, publicfile, and djbdns were released as license-free software. This was used by some of the people that were offended by his criticism to stop the distribution of his software, so that Linux distributions such as Debian which used qmail internally did not distribute qmail. OpenBSD a security focused operating system had the majority of its security exploits as a result of its decision to stay with Sendmail and Bind and removed qmail and djbdns from its ports as part of the license dispute. This issue was removed when all Bernstein's software became public domain software in 2007.
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