Daniel Julius Bernstein (sometimes known as djb; born October 29, 1971, Mandarin name: 狄傑比[2]) is an American mathematician, cryptologist, and computer scientist.

[7] In 1987, he achieved a Top 10 ranking in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition,[8] and was a member of the second-place team from Princeton University the following year.

The ruling in the case declared that software was protected speech under the First Amendment, which contributed to regulatory changes reducing controls on encryption.

[20] Many protocols based on his works have been adopted by various standards organizations and are used in a variety of applications, such as Apple iOS,[21] the Linux kernel,[22] OpenSSH,[23][24] and Tor.

[27] In April 2008,[28] Bernstein's stream cipher "Salsa20" was selected as a member of the final portfolio of the eSTREAM project, part of a European Union research directive.

[29] Starting in the mid-1990s, Bernstein wrote a number of security-aware programs, including qmail, ezmlm, djbdns, ucspi-tcp, daemontools, and publicfile.

DNSCurve applies techniques from elliptic curve cryptography with the goal of providing a vast increase in performance over the RSA public-key algorithm used by DNSSEC.

Several prominent researchers (among them Arjen Lenstra, Adi Shamir, Jim Tomlinson, and Eran Tromer) disagreed strongly with Bernstein's conclusions.

[citation needed] In February 2015, Bernstein and others published a paper on a stateless post-quantum hash-based signature scheme called SPHINCS.

[43] In July 2022, SPHINCS+, a signature scheme adapted from SPHINCS by Bernstein and others, was one of four algorithms selected as winners of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization competition.

[44][45] In April 2017, Bernstein and others published a paper on Post-Quantum RSA that includes an integer factorization algorithm claimed to be "often much faster than Shor's".