Staff Bio
Eric Rescorla is the Chief Technologist for the Center for Forecasting and Outbreaks Analytics (CFA) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He leads the technology strategy for CFA's public health analytics and forecasting systems.
Previous experience
Before joining CDC, Eric was the Chief Technology Officer for Firefox and Internet Platform at Mozilla. There, he was responsible for setting the overall technical strategy for the Firefox browser and Mozilla's participation in Internet standards and global policy. At Mozilla, Eric led the roadmap for Gecko, Mozilla's Web engine. He oversaw Mozilla's standards work at IETF and W3C. Eric researched and implemented new technologies, transferred them into the browser, and built technical partnerships with other organizations to advance Mozilla's mission.
Eric has contributed extensively to many of the core Internet security protocols, including TLS, DTLS, WebRTC, ACME, and QUIC. He was editor of the TLS 1.3 protocol, which secures the majority of Web traffic. In order to remove barriers to encryption on the web, Eric co-founded Let's Encrypt, a free and automated certificate authority. Today, Let's Encrypt issues more than a million certificates a day and has helped increase the fraction of Web traffic that is encrypted from around 30% to around 80% globally and 90+% in the US. Eric worked extensively on WebRTC, which allows anyone to videoconference directly from their browser and is used in services such as WebEx, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. Most recently, he worked on developing technologies for privacy preserving measurement and privacy preserving advertising.
Achievements
Eric has published extensively in networking and security, including work on large-scale Internet measurement using both browsers and advertising networks. He is a former member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group and the Internet Architecture Board. In 2019, he was awarded the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography for his work on TLS 1.3.