Werner Koch
Chief Executive Officer at g10 Code GmbH
Dusseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
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SeniorWerner Koch is a veteran software engineer and entrepreneur with 28 years of experience building systems from CP/M-era drivers to modern cryptographic tooling. As founder and CEO of g10 Code and CTO of gnupg.com, he leads development and commercial support for GnuPG and related end-to-end encryption solutions. He is the principal author and long-time maintainer of GNU Privacy Guard, contributing deep expertise in key management, certificate handling, and modern algorithms such as PSS and ECDSA. A longtime free software advocate and FSFE co-founder, he blends principled open-source stewardship with practical productization and consulting. Based in Düsseldorf, he remains an active back-end developer on the canonical GnuPG codebase, ensuring cryptographic robustness for a global user base. An uncommon combination of assembler-era hacker and contemporary security architect, he focuses on making strong encryption usable and deployable.
28 years of coding experience
German, English
Github Skills (10)
c1710
crypto10
algorithm10
it-security10
crypt10
algorithms10
openpgp10
c1110
cryptography10
security10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
gpg/gnupg
Nov 2017 - Jun 2021
The GNU Privacy Guard. NOTE: Maintainers are not tracking this mirror. Do not make pull requests here, nor comment any commits, submit them usual way to bug tracker (https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/bts.html) or to the mailing list (https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/mailing-lists.html).
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1285 commits, 2 comments in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Werner's commits focus on the development and improvement of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) software, particularly its command-line tool. They worked on enhancements related to certificate handling, key management and security protocols by adding features such as the --force-sign-key and --no-auto-trust-new-key options. The commits also include the implementation of enhancements to support PSS and ECDSA.
bug-trackergnuopenpgp
GPGTools/pinentry
Jun 2002 - Oct 2020
Contributions:194 commits in 18 years 7 months
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