Abstract dark blue technology background

Security Architect & Engineering Leader

I solve the problems that cross layers.

Hardware, firmware, software, infrastructure: I follow the problem wherever it goes, then make the finished system simple to use, deploy, and maintain.

GovCon Enclave case study Mistborn case study Selected work
15+ years building systems & leading the teams that ship them Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) 2026 Special Mention CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional · OSCP Offensive Security Certified Professional · eCXD eLearnSecurity Certified eXploit Developer · OSWP Offensive Security Wireless Professional

Case study

Mistborn: from empty repo to shipped platform

I took Mistborn from an empty repo to a platform covered by Linux Pro Magazine: a Django control plane orchestrating WireGuard, iptables, Pi-hole, and Traefik so that a 2 GB VPS or a Raspberry Pi could run secure private infrastructure with passwordless, key-based access. I owned everything: product, architecture, code, releases, docs, and support.

Years maintained

4+

First commit March 2020, final release work December 2024

Tagged releases

25

v0.1 through v2.4.x across the two core repositories

Commits

800+

Effectively solo, across platform and container repos

Optional services

11+

Nextcloud, Jitsi, Vaultwarden, Home Assistant, Wazuh SIEM, and more

WireGuard iptables Django PostgreSQL Redis Celery Traefik Pi-hole Docker
Read the case study Thinking through a founding-engineer hire? Glad to compare notes Also read: the GovCon Enclave case study
“Just wanted to reach out and tell you what a fantastic project Mistborn is. I have been telling everyone I can about it. It was the one I was looking for to tell my clients about for security at home.”
CEO of a cybersecurity services firm · 2024
“Thank you for building such a powerful system, and thank you even more for publishing it free and open source.”
A user on a heavily censored network · 2021

More of what people said →

Featured book

Long-form writing

All books →
Cover of The Wrong Lessons

Nonfiction

The Wrong Lessons

The more vivid the experience, the more confidently we draw the wrong lesson from it.

From the officers who watched the machine gun win in Manchuria and still went home preaching the bayonet, to the gambler who mistakes a streak for skill and the country trapped in a failing war, one engine keeps turning hard-won experience into false certainty. Drawing on war, leadership, and behavioral science, The Wrong Lessons follows that error across the disasters it has caused, then asks why, in each one, a few people saw clearly anyway. Their edge was not talent or better information. It was distance, and distance can be borrowed.

Read the book

Selected work

From the notebook

Notes on vulnerability research, technical leadership, and AI security.

Vulnerability analysis

Copy Fail and Dirty Frag: A Shared-Fragment Invariant

Copy Fail and Dirty Frag, three Linux CVEs in ten days, share one root cause: in-place crypto fast paths that write over paged fragments they do not own.

Pattern analysis of three Linux CVEs found and disclosed by other researchers. These are not my findings.

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Technical leadership

Leading small teams that punch above their weight

What leading eight missionaries through cyclone season taught me about building small engineering teams that outperform their headcount.

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AI security

Why prompt injection is architecturally hard to solve

Prompt injection is structural in any system that mixes instructions and untrusted data in one context, not a patchable prompting bug.

Read
Research and disclosures → Shipped projects → Tutorial library → Books and long-form writing →

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I speak about security architecture, vulnerability research, AI security, and leading technical teams.

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