Today I have had great pleasure in attending the Real World Crypto 2018 conference in Zürich in order to receive the Levchin prize on behalf of the OpenSSL team.

The Levchin prize for Real World Cryptography recognises up to two groups or individuals each year who have made significant advances in the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems. This year one of the two recipients is the OpenSSL team. The other recipient is Hugo Krawczyk.

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The team were selected by the selection committee “for dramatic improvements to the code quality of OpenSSL”. You can read the press release here.

We have worked very hard over the last few years to build an active and engaged community around the project. I am very proud of what that community has collectively achieved. Although this prize names specific individuals in the OpenSSL team, I consider ourselves to just be the custodians of the project. In a very real way this prize is for the whole community. It is fantastic to be recognised in this way.

The job is not done though. There is still much work we need to do. I am confident though that our community will work together to achieve what needs to be done.