Solar Designer

Alexander Peslyak, better known as Solar Designer, is Senior Principal Security Engineer at CIQ, where he co-leads the Linux security team. He has been security-hardening Linux since 1997, when he was first to introduce non-executable memory to Linux, then founding and maintaining the Openwall GNU/*/Linux distribution for two decades - and now building upon this experience for Rocky Linux from CIQ - Hardened (RLC-H).

Alexander has founded and co-maintains popular Open Source projects including John the Ripper and other password security tools, designed the yescrypt password hash adopted by recent versions of major Linux distributions, co-maintains Linux Kernel Runtime Guard, and runs the oss-security and (linux-)distros mailing lists - among many other past and current activities. Alexander spoke at prominent computer security conferences, such as keynoting OffensiveCon 2024.