About the Author

Loren Kohnfelder began programming over fifty years ago. As an undergraduate at MIT, his thesis “Towards a Practical Public-Key Cryptosystem” (1978) first described digital certificates and the foundations of public key infrastructure (PKI).

His 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, he 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, he 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.

About the Technical Reviewer

Since the early days of Commodore PET and VIC-20, technology has been a constant companion (and sometimes an obsession!) to Cliff Janzen. Cliff spends a majority of the work day managing and mentoring a great team of security professionals, but strives to stay technically relevant by tackling everything from security policy reviews to penetration testing to incident response. He feels lucky to have a career that is also his favorite hobby and a wife who supports him.