Loren Kohnfelder

I began programming over fifty years ago, and my path has crossed into security a few times. Currently I'm publishing a book to collect learnings from my experience and share it back to the software community.As a student at MIT, my thesis, Towards a Practical Public Key Cryptosystem; (S.B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1978), first described digital certificates and the foundations of public key infrastructure (PKI).My software career spans a wide variety of programming jobs, from punched cards, writing disk controller drivers, a linking loader, video games, two stints in Japan, to equipment control software in a semiconductor research lab.At Microsoft, I returned to security work on the Internet Explorer team, and later, the .NET platform security team, contributing to the industry’s first proactive security process methodology.Most recently, at Google, I worked as a software engineer on the security team and later as a founding member of the privacy team, performing well over one hundred security design reviews of large-scale commercial systems.