There's "famous", below that, maybe "wonk famous" and then there's "nerd famous". At the time, Bruce was only the latter, at best; in fact, probably only at the

There's "famous", below that, maybe "wonk famous" and then there's "nerd famous". At the time, Bruce was only the latter, at best; in fact, probably only at the lower, entry-level, "crypto nerd famous". Now, he's arguably wonk famous (that is, within epsilon, everyone on HN has heard of him, a reasonable fraction of readers of the NYT op-ed page will recognize his name, but less than 5% of the US population). Yes, I think Paul is probably the mass-market father of side channel attacks; I believe he has the first published research on power use attacks and he's also done good work on timing attacks. And, yes, SSL 2 is a mess: it was only not-broken enough (with the info we had at the time) to not be an SSL 1 or heartbleed-like "patch ALL the software" crisis.