Ben Laurie - Owner at CognitionX

Ben Laurie

Owner at CognitionX

Llanwrda, Wales, United Kingdom

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Ben Laurie is a veteran software engineer and security-focused systems designer with over 30 years of programming experience and a track record of stewarding foundational internet security projects. As founder and core team member of OpenSSL and a long-time contributor to Certificate Transparency at Google, he blends deep cryptography expertise with practical engineering—having fixed timing side-channels, buffer issues, and built auditing servers used for TLS certificate transparency. He has led security and transparency efforts at organizations from DeepMind to Google, serves on advisory boards including Our Future Health UK, and remains active in open source across projects like FreeBSD, Apache, Caja and Paparazzi. Based in rural Wales, he pairs rigorous technical craftsmanship with advocacy for privacy and civil liberties, and—less obviously—bridges high-assurance cryptographic work with embedded systems and IoT motor-control contributions.

18 years of coding experience

25 years of employment as a software developer

Latymer

Incomplete Mathematics, Incomplete Mathematics at University of Cambridge

Stackoverflow

Stats

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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)

JavaC++CRustF*CoqMakefileTeX

Github contributions (5)

google/certificate-transparency

Nov 2011 - Apr 2016

Auditing for TLS certificates.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions: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

Contributions: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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