About Me

Work on Katzenpost is ongoing! Katzenpost is the first mix network to use post quantum hybrid cryptographic protocols, an effort I have been leading for the past few months. In some cases my cryptographic security improvements have incidentally also improved performance.

I will describe mix network threat model to you, if you ask. Let’s talk privacy notions, decoy traffic, messaging system design, timing attacks, cryptographic protocol construction, mitigating long term passive statistical disclosure attacks by sufficiently global adversaries. Mitigating various types of active attacks such as n-1 attacks, sybil attacks, tagging attacks, timing attacks.

Here’s the Katzenpost kan ban board we use to organize our work:

https://github.com/orgs/katzenpost/projects/6/views/5

I recently finished my working relationship with a block chain related company I had the pleasure to work with a couple of talented Rust developers. I learned a lot about various blockchain projects and how to compose transactions with Rust and Golang, sign them and then submit them to a blockchain node over the specified JSON HTTP RPC, smart contract ABI etc.

I’m a software developer, security researcher and public speaker. In the past I’ve written software tools useful for active and passive network forensics operations, they are all open source and mentioned in my projects, for example back in 2014 I wrote a tool I named Honeybadger after the original honeybadger meme video, which detects TCP injection attacks. I wrote this tool because I was inspired by the Edward Snowden document leaks which discussed the NSA’s so called “quantum insert” attack; which is just a silly way to say “TCP injection”.

Since then my focus has been on cryptographic protocols and anonymous communication networks. After working on a number of Tor related research and software development projects, in 2017 I started work on the European Commission funded grant project known as the Horizon 2020 Panoramix Project (Privacy and Accountability in Networks via Optimized Randomized Mix-nets). During this time I collaborated with some of the top European academic researchers to design and implement the Katzenpost mix network, a message oriented anonymous communication network. While working on Katzenpost I enjoyed giving many public talks at security, hacker and privacy conferences around Europe to explain mix networks and anonymous communication.