Abstract dark blue technology background

Hands-on CTO & Security Architect

I build products, platforms, and the teams that ship them.

From first commit through production, scale, and acquisition, I stay close to the technology. 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

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.

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Research and disclosures → Shipped projects →

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 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

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