Oral History with Paul Kocher

Abstract

This oral history interview is sponsored by and a part of NSF 2202484 “Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy,” at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. It is an interview with Paul Kocher by videoconference.

The interview begins with Kocher’s interest and experience programming prior to attending Stanford University, his interests in math and biology, and his goal to be a veterinarian. He relates summer jobs he had while at Stanford, first at software company Symantec and then at RSA Data Security. He discusses meeting Hellman at Stanford in his second year, support and encouragement from Hellman, and his participation as a student in a group at Stanford of Silicon Valley cryptographers.

Hellman referred consulting opportunities to Kocher during the early the growth of the Internet and Web, which enabled to Kocher to pursue cryptography as an early career. Kocher formed Cryptography Research Inc. in 1995, initially with just him doing consulting but soon adding others and branching beyond consulting.

Kocher discusses various projects, including his pathbreaking work with Taher Elgamal on Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0/Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0, a protocol to protect communications over the Internet. He relates how his knowledge and exposure to many areas like statistics without a focus in one contributed to his discovery of timing channel attacks and power analysis attacks (both categories of side channel attacks). The interview also explores the growth of the company, the variety of technical projects it did for clients, and how consulting led to opportunities to also explore other security research. He recounts the context of the Spectre paper. He also reflects upon the field of computer security broadly in terms complexity adding to vulnerabilities/risks and the economics of computer security. He highlights that he was able to work with many great people who together achieved impactful new technologies, techniques, and understandings in the field of computer security. Kocher tells of how, as the company grew larger, it needed to internally expand more of the infrastructure typical of larger corporations, or be acquired by another corporation. The latter made more sense and Cryptography Research, Inc. merged with Rambus in 2011. Finally, he mentions how the success of the company and the merger allowed him to become more involved in philanthropy.