Venrock is poaching Kocher from McKinsey, where he led the McKinsey Center for Health Reform.
Kocher is soft-spoken, young and obscure, but his credibility in the encryption business is sterling.
Polonski was able to loosen it with his finger and a tong-like instrument called Kocher forceps.
Kocher is in the middle of a battle between Sony and Toshiba to define the new standards.
With SSL Kocher had full control over how the protocol would turn out.
Film executives like the fact that Kocher's scheme gives them a stronger hand.
Kocher states this is necessary for companies making products where security matters and they are willing to expend some extra effort.
"The formats have to decide to build in a system that will make it possible to fix problems later, " says Kocher.
Earlier, new Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura announced the line-up of the new Cabinet, with Kocher Gemba named as foreign minister.
No studio executive contacted would comment on Kocher's scheme on the record, but it looks likely to be the backbone of any eventual security standard.
Eight years ago, fresh out of Stanford, Kocher cowrote Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the protocol that secures the vast majority of commerce on the Internet.
Kocher redesigned the system to ensure that seller and buyer are working off of the strongest encryption possible, and that if someone interferes, the sale fails.
What Kocher is pushing is the concept of renewable security.
"It's not a good job from a financial perspective, but it includes the interesting parts of medicine, and if you make a mistake you haven't done in someone's grandma, " says Kocher.
Kocher, son of a physics professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says he learned about computing because he stayed home a lot, too lazy to bike the two miles into town.
"With very few exceptions, all the major security systems being used by the studios today are either broken and can't be fixed, or they're not deployed widely enough to be worth hacking, " says Kocher.
How your toaster or washing machine or new car will stay on top of emerging security concerns years after initial production is a very real concern, one that Kocher, a respected cryptographer, has given some thought.
For the most part Kocher has avoided political battles, sitting through the endless, heated standards meetings and tapping on his Treo from the side of the room, interrupting quietly now and then to endorse his fix.
Mr. Kocher, whose company, Cryptography Research, develops and licenses custom chips to protect data networks and prevent content piracy, says tech companies are making reasonable choices about safeguards, but fare poorly in some studies because they are better at discovering they have been hacked.
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