Solar Designer

Alexander Peslyak (Александр Песляк) (born 1977), better known as Solar Designer, is a security specialist from Russia. He is best known for his publications on exploitation techniques, including the return-to-libc attack and the first generic heap-based buffer overflow exploitation technique,^[1] as well as computer security protection techniques such as privilege separation for daemon processes.

Peslyak is the author of the widely popular^[2] password cracking tool John the Ripper. His code has also been used in various third-party operating systems, such as OpenBSD and Debian.