Daniel J. Bernstein



Daniel J. Bernstein (born October 29, 1971) (known among users of his software and members of his mailing lists as simply "djb") is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a mathematician, a cryptologist, and a programmer, noted as the author of the computer software qmail and djbdns.


 * "The great thing about attackers is that there are so many to choose from!"

On testing

 * "Of course, the test difficulty depends on what you're doing, and on how you're doing it. I'm constantly asking "How much would I have to screw this up to write an incorrect function that passes these simple tests?"  Occasionally the answer is "Not much," so I'll throw the code away and  start over. It was probably perfect code, but that's not good enough."
 * "I often see people saying 'Nobody has produced an invulnerable software system; therefore, nobody will ever produce an invulnerable software system.' "By the same bogus reasoning, nobody will ever reach Mars; nobody will ever find MD5 collisions; nobody will ever cure cancer; nobody will ever prove the Poincare conjecture; nobody will ever clone a human; nobody will ever build a 1GHz CPU; nobody will ever find SHA-1 collisions; nobody will ever break the sound barrier; etc." (15 January 2005)
 * "So it's tempting to incorporate a smaller resolver library into qmail. [...] I'd no longer be able to blame the BIND authors and vendors for the fact that attackers can easily use DNS to steal mail." [From the file "THOUGHTS" of the qmail distribution]