You are here: Home > Participate > RIPE Community > Working Groups > Active Working Groups > DNS Working Group > WG Chair Biographies

WG Chair Biographies

DNS WG Chair Biographies

João Luis Silva Damas

João is currently working as a Senior Researcher at APNIC.

Previously, he has worked at ISC (Internet Systems Consortium) as Chief Technology Officer overseeing technical developments. Before that, he served as Chief Technology Officer at the RIPE NCC and later founded a consulting and research company, Bond Internet Systems. He also co-founded a DNS startup, Hivecast, which was acquired by Dyn Inc.

He has organised the RIPE plenary programme for around 7 years and launched the current RIPE Programme Committee.

In 2008, together with colleagues, João launched ESNOG to bring together Spanish ISP's to interact with each other, an activity that continues to this day.

Moritz Müller

Moritz Müller is a research engineer at SIDN, the registry of the Dutch ccTLD where he started in 2015. There, he works for the research department, SIDN Labs, carrying out studies on all things related to the DNS, DNSSEC and domain name abuse. Among others, he studied the first Root KSK rollover, DNSSEC key rollovers in general, and the deployment of future quantum-safe algorithms in DNSSEC. At the same time, he develops solutions with the goal to detect malicious domain names and to support domain name abuse analysts.

Since 2017, Moritz is a guest researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands at the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) group. He defended his PhD thesis titled "Making DNSSEC Future Proof" in 2021. In the same year, he joined the DNS Working Group as co-chair.

Originally from Southwest Germany, Moritz is living in the Netherlands since 2014.

Willem Toorop

Willem Toorop is a developer and researcher at NLnet Labs. Willem has a special interest in delivering first class security and privacy (with DNSSEC and encrypted DNS) to end-users at the edges of the internet.

Willem likes working with authors from other Open Source DNS Software and DNS Operators on Open Standards and at hackathons to achieve interoperability of the different DNS software.

He also enjoys doing measurements on the state of the internet and the DNS, in order to provide feedback for operators, and to have a better view of where things can be improved protocol wise and in software.

He is passionate about his work and cannot help himself talking, explaining and presenting about it.