rescorla

It's not hard to see why Rescorla would get roped into this: he's a standards sherpa.

I am convinced by your argument that Eric Rescorla is indeed a respectable person and not working for NSA secretly, but your flagging the question is too much.

Simultaneously, a team at Mozilla led by Josh Aas and Eric Rescorla was working on creating a free and automated certificate authority.

Bernstein cavalierly mentions Rescorla in this paper, but never provides the additional color that Rescorla himself on the mailing list said he had no idea why the extension needed to exist, and did not understand its parameters.

Well there's at least one other document coauthored by M Salter and E Rescorla [1], so the notion that Rescorla was manipulated into co-authoring the Extended Random paper has is a bit more problematic since it wasn't a one-off collaboration.

If you want to get some oddball extension you need for your internal systems specified, so that other systems might interoperate with yours, Rescorla is naturally the person you'd turn to.

I have more respect for Eric Rescorla than anyone else I can think of working in standards, but interoperability with existing crypto is a terrible, terrible goal for a web crypto API.

Eric Rescorla's post, linked upthread, goes into detail about why "OS's and browsers" can't easily solve this problem without breaking the Internet for materially large fractions of their users.

I remember "SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems" by Eric Rescorla being really useful to understand the history behind TLS and how we got here.

I think I pointed that out because I'm knee-jerk waiting for the horrible "Eric Rescorla is an NSA plant" arguments --- which, as it turned out, never really came.

The authors of the 2008 paper on the protocol were Margaret Salter, technical director of the NSA's defensive Information Assurance Directorate, and an outside expert named Eric Rescorla." Given Rescorla involvement with the TLS standard and Mozilla it's concerning that he declined to comment on this.

Rescorla's name on an Internet draft is hardly an endorsement from Rescorla.

Rescorla is perhaps the most experienced person on the Internet at turning TLS WG mailing list discussions into Internet drafts.

Some have claimed that Eric Rescorla's privacy is being violated.