Kocher was awarded the 2019
Marconi Prize with
Taher Elgamal for architecting the
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0/
Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 protocol, a cryptographic protocol for secure communications on the Internet. He pioneered the field of
side-channel attacks, including the development of
timing attacks that can break implementations of
RSA,
DSA and fixed-exponent
Diffie–Hellman that operate in non-constant time, as well as the co-development of
power analysis and differential power analysis. His side-channel attack countermeasure designs are widely deployed in secure integrated circuits and other cryptographic devices. He has also worked on microprocessor security, and co-discovered and named the
spectre vulnerability, which leverages speculative execution and other microprocessor performance optimizations to extract confidential information. He also helped architect security-related integrated circuits, including
Deep Crack, a
DES brute-force key search machine. ==Honors and awards==