Announcing Mozilla Fellow, Eric Rescorla

I am pleased to announce that Eric Rescorla has been appointed Mozilla Fellow, a vice-president level role created to recognize top technical leadership at Mozilla. This new role is a complement to the organization's existing Distinguished Engineers award and is distinct from Mozilla's other existing fellowship programs. As part of Mozilla's executive leadership team, Eric will provide key technical expertise and representation for Engineering broadly in all aspects of company decision making.

Eric has a long history of important contributions to the Web, both inside and outside Mozilla, and has served as a thought leader across the security community. Much of his work has been on Transport Layer Security (TLS) the foundational security protocol for the Web. He is the former chair of the IETF TLS Working group as well as the editor of the TLS and HTTPS specifications, and is the author of one of the standard books on TLS. He also co-designed Datagram TLS (DTLS) and DTLS-SRTP, the core security protocols for WebRTC, which is bringing voice and video communications directly into the browser. He served on the Internet Architecture Board from 2002 to 2008.

In addition to his technical standards work, Eric has been involved in many other key areas of intersection between technology and policy. In 2007, he served on California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's Top-to-Bottom Review of the voting systems certified for use in California and in 2014 he was a member of the team which demonstrated security vulnerabilities in X-ray backscatter full-body scanners (advanced imaging technologies). In 2013, he was one of the authors of the Center for Democracy and Technology's report on the dangers of government restrictions on cryptography. He has also been called upon to advise governments and policy makers broadly on privacy and security topics.

Since joining in 2013, Eric has been a key member of Mozilla's technical team. He was instrumental in the development of Mozilla's WebRTC implementation, and worked with Cisco to start OpenH264, which allows open source projects to use the world's most popular video codec for free. He also played a key role in starting Let's Encrypt, a free, automated, and open certificate authority which makes it easy for anyone to run a secure website.

The Fellow role places expanded emphasis on driving our mission forward at a technical level to benefit the open Web and moving the industry as a whole towards open technical development. As part of Mozilla's executive leadership team, Eric will provide key technical expertise and representation for engineering broadly in all aspects of company decision making. He will report directly to me as CTO.

We are pleased to recognize Eric's achievements and expanded scope with the title of Fellow, the most senior engineering position within the organization. Please join me in welcoming Eric to the executive team at Mozilla.