My name is Martin Thomson.
I’m a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla. I work with the many fine people at Mozilla and other companies to build a better Internet. My interests are in networking, security, and the web, but I’m a bit of a generalist.
Recently, my attention has been on the use of finding ways to support advertising that don’t have a high human cost in privacy violations. I helped found the W3C Private Advertising Technology Community Group where I’m to apply technology to online advertising while maintaining strong guarantees for individual privacy.
The IETF has published a number of RFCs with my name on them. Active work there includes oblivious HTTP. I also maintain somewhat controversial opinions on topics like how we should promote interoperability or the role of intermediaries.
Published work includes QUIC (RFC 8999, RFC 9000, RFC 9001), HTTP/2 (RFC 7540), WebPush (RFC 8030, RFC 8291, RFC 8292, and the W3C API). I’ve also published extensions to HTTP (RFC 7639, RFC8188, RFC8164), TLS (RFC 8449), WebRTC (RFC 7675) and HELD (RFC 5985, RFC 5986, and many more). I’ve written about maintaining protocol extensibility (RFC 9170), how to use early data in HTTP (RFC8470), why using SSL 3.0 is no longer a good idea (RFC 7568, and how to manage use of GitHub at the IETF (RFC8874).
I’ve worked at Nortel Networks, Andrew/Commscope, Microsoft (Skype), and Mozilla. I served on the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) from 2016 to 2020. I’ve helped a few IETF working groups complete their work as chair (geojson, captive portals); I am currently chair of the sframe Working Group.
Likely against all good sense, I write code. I am a module owner of NSS, which includes the TLS and cryptography stack used by Firefox. I also wrote a lot of neqo, which is the QUIC stack used by Firefox. I maintain tools for managing Internet-Drafts.