Alexander Peslyak

Who is Alexander Peslyak?

Alexander Peslyak, better known as Solar Designer, is a security specialist from Russia. He is best known for his publications on exploitation techniques, including the return-to-libc attack and the first generic heap-based buffer overflow exploitation technique, as well as computer security protection techniques such as privilege separation for daemon processes. Peslyak is the author of the widely popular security audit tool John the Ripper. His code has also been used in various third-party operating systems, such as OpenBSD and Debian.

Alexander is the founder and leader of the Openwall Project, the founder and CTO of Openwall, Inc., an advisory board member at the Open Source Computer Emergency Response Team, and was co-founder at oss-security.

He has spoken at many international conferences, including FOSDEM and CanSecWest. He wrote the foreword to Michał Zalewski's 2005 book Silence on the Wire.

Alexander received the 2009 "Lifetime Achievement Award" during the annual Pwnie Award at the Black Hat Security Conference.