Alexander Peslyak

Alexander Peslyak, born in 1977 and better known as Solar Designer, is a security specialist from Russia. He is best known for publications on exploitation techniques, including the return-to-libc attack and the first generic heap-based buffer overflow exploitation technique, and for protection techniques such as privilege separation for daemon processes. He is the author of the widely used password cracking tool John the Ripper, and his code has been used in third-party operating systems including OpenBSD and Debian. He founded and leads the Openwall Project, which he started in 1999, founded Openwall, Inc. and has been its CTO since 2003, served on the advisory board of the Open Source Computer Emergency Response Team until 2017 and co-founded oss-security. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Pwnie Awards.