Phil Karn

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Phil Karn (born October 4, 1956) is a retired American engineer from Lutherville, Maryland. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1978 and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. He worked at Bell Labs from 1979 to 1984, then at Bell Communications Research from 1984 to 1991, and later at Qualcomm in San Diego starting in 1991, focusing on wireless data networking, security, and cryptography.

Karn has been a longtime contributor to the Internet Engineering Task Force and to Internet architecture. He is the author or co-author of several RFCs and is known for Karn's Algorithm, which helps calculate the round-trip time for IP packet retransmission. He is also famous in amateur radio for the KA9Q Network Operating System (NOS) and for helping develop early 9600 bit/s FSK modems. He contributed to applying forward error correction to amateur radio satellites, including the AO-40 satellite, and won the 1989 Dayton Hamvention Specific Achievement Award.

He serves as a board member and President Emeritus of Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC), a nonprofit funded by selling part of its IP address space to support amateur radio and digital communications through grants. In 1990 he predicted that most Internet access would move from wired links to wireless radio links.

Karn has spoken and written about encryption and the history of the Internet. He was involved in a high-profile legal case over export controls on crypto source code, which helped lead to relaxed rules in 2000.