I create digital infrastructure for commercial gain. Captivated by a Berkeley astronomer chasing KGB hackers, I trained in compsci and cryptography, worked at universities, research labs, startups, dragged science fiction into reality; designing, architecting, implementing, and bringing to market complex systems, specialising in auditability, confidentiality, and verifiability, at scale with high-performance. MEng, PhD, Honorary Fellow. Journey:
Complex systems are non-deterministic; we cannot predict, a priori, exactly what they'll do, yet we need to control them. Human confidence fails far more often than maths, so cryptographers trust no-one, not themselves, nor their colleagues, only cold, unforgiving proofs that systems do exactly what they're supposed to. This mathematical hacking toolkit helped me break every system I touched, and to ensure my systems are unbreakable:
Society operates on critical infrastructure — pipelines, roads, rails span the ground beneath us, cargo fleets moving economies through vast oceans, aircraft and satellites up in the sky. "Good" isn't enough; these systems must not fail. They all run on software, mine among them, held to that same unforgiving bar. Good cryptography sleeps for decades before the world wakes to it; inventing is half the work, getting anyone to want it the other:
Pre-agent zero days include complete break of internet encryption, walking into bank and announcing I control online transfers, starting cars without keys, architectural faults in national elections, unveiling hardware-based anonymity. Post agent, lost track. Sixteen patents, nine pending, twenty-two conference papers, nine journal articles, one IETF standard, twenty-eight hundred citations. Highs:
Communication: Web, mobile, and hardware standards fail catastrophically, I break them and prove the fixes, hardening the protocols billions trust.
Governance: Nations are adopting election systems that are unfit for purpose, I pondered the meaning of free and fair governance for twenty-one years, I have my answer, and a voting system that delivers.
Reasoning: A proof is only as trustworthy as the logic that checks it, I build the automated reasoning beneath the other two, turning hand-waving into machine-checked certainty.
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