Ben Laurie
Owner at CognitionX
Llanwrda, Wales, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Laurie is a security-focused software engineer and system designer with over 30 years of programming experience, best known as a founder and core team member of OpenSSL. Currently a Principal Engineer at Google running the Certificate Transparency project, he is a long-standing Apache member, FreeBSD committer and Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His work spans cryptography, privacy and civil liberties—he has implemented constant-time fixes and padding mitigations in OpenSSL and helped build auditing infrastructure for TLS certificates. Beyond core crypto, Ben contributes to embedded and IoT projects (Paparazzi UAV, g2 motor firmware), demonstrating hands-on firmware and sensor-data expertise alongside large-scale backend systems. Based in Llanwrda, Wales, he combines open source stewardship and advisory roles in health and policy with an unexpectedly rural base as owner of Glansevin Mansion.
18 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
LatymerIncomplete, Mathematics, Incomplete, Mathematics at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (39)
debug10
javascript10
c-language10
ssl10
tls1210
event-handling10
vulnerability10
firmware10
it-security10
c1110
tls1310
network-programming10
java10
security10
c1710
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
google/certificate-transparency
Nov 2011 - Apr 2016
Auditing for TLS certificates.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:227 commits, 8 PRs, 2 pushes in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ben implemented the beginnings of a command-line client and a general server for auditing TLS certificates. The code changes primarily involved the creation of a server-side component with event handling and network input/output capabilities. The user added functionality for handling client connections, reading data, and basic server operations within the `ct-server.cc` file, while laying out the client interface in `ct.cc`.
letsencryptsslsecuritycertificate-transparencytls
openssl/openssl
Feb 2015 - Sep 2017
TLS/SSL and crypto library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:4 PRs, 51 comments, 6 issues in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to fixing warnings and addressing potential security vulnerabilities within the OpenSSL library, focusing on cryptography, TLS/SSL, and cryptographic libraries. Their work involved modifying code to eliminate warnings, improve code quality, and incorporate constant-time comparisons to mitigate timing-based side-channel attacks, particularly related to padding vulnerabilities in TLS/SSL CBC records. Furthermore, the user made numerous changes to address potential buffer overruns.
crypto-librarycryptographyssltlscrypto
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