Paul Hoffman

Paul E. Hoffman is a Principal Technologist at ICANN, starting there in July 2015. He works in the technical end of the DNS, developing standards and associated documents.

He is the author or co-author of many DNS-related RFCs from the IETF, particular in the areas of IDNs and DNSSEC. These include:

• RFC 3454, RFC 3490, and RFC 3491 for IDNA 2003, the first standard for IDNs

• RFC 5895 and RFC 6452 for IDNA 2008, the current standard for IDNs

• RFC 6014 and RFC 6605 for DNSSEC

• RFC 6698 for DANE

• RFC 6927 about variants in second-level names registered in TLDs

• RFC 7085 about TLDs that are already dotless

His ICANN work includes helping prepare "Name Collision Identification and Mitigation for IT Professionals".

He is also the originator and editor of the getdns specification, which is a modern application program interface (API) for the DNS. Verisign is sponsoring an implementation of that API.

He was also the director of the VPN Consortium from 1999 through 2014.