KeesCook

Revision 16 as of 2006-10-10 17:56:09

Clear message

About Me

Hi! I work for Canonical as an Ubuntu Security Engineer. My work is to stay alert, curious, and creative while keeping one step ahead of the bad guys. When I'm not working, I've been known to play with MythTV and generally poke around at video formats. (My name is pronounced 'case', but uses the Dutch spelling -- I was named after my grandfather.)

Community

I've only recently become involved in the Ubuntu community, but have been using Ubuntu since Hoary. (I had been a Debian user for a few years prior to Ubuntu.) As the lead sysadmin at [http://www.osdl.org/ OSDL], I chose Ubuntu as the default distro for all new servers, replaced most of the aging RedHat systems, and kept the visitor lobby stocked with fresh Ubuntu CDs. Nothing beats having a Debian system with a regular release cycle.

More recently, I have been involved in:

Outside of Ubuntu, I'm involved in other communities. I am a [http://kernel.org/ kernel.org] admin, where I work on maintaining the mirror network for the Linux Kernel, as well as handling user accounts. I am a lurker/janitor for the [http://inkscape.org/ Inkscape] project, through which I'm also involved in the [http://openclipart.org/ Open Clip Art Library] and [http://creativecommons.com/ Creative Commons]. I have [http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_sess/9252 presented] for two years running at [http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2006/ OSCON], and I attend [http://defcon.org/ DefCon] annually. This year, with the rest of my team, we won the [http://nopsr.us/ctf2006/ Capture The Flag] security competition.

Software

Future

I have been an advocate of free software since I first understood what the GPL meant. I love tweaking and patching and helping make things better; I've always had a knack for getting software to behave in unexpected ways. I think finding security problems is fun, and I want to spend my time hunting down and squashing those problems where ever I can find them. Free software already has a strong security reputation, and I want to help keep it that way.

In the near-time, I want to start doing manual code audits of as much of Ubuntu as I can get my arms around. I want to help define and implement protected execution environments. Some of the task has already been done ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit NX bit], [wiki:GccSsp SSP]), but there will always be work in other areas (["SELinux"], AppArmor, [http://www.grsecurity.net/ grsecurity]). Security is a moving target.

In the long-term, I want to contribute to developing code analysis tools (both static and dynamic), so that more software can be examined for common problems automatically.

CategoryHomepage