What I learned in my year after our IPO It was raining in Seattle. There was almost a warm familiarity to the cold, night haze that scythed through the buildings in South Lake Union — a reminder of growing up in Seattle and embracing it like an uncomfortable but reliable…

What I’ve learned in my startup journey with HashiCorp — “Oh tell me why Do we build castles in the sky? Oh tell me why Are the castles way up high?” - Ian Van Dahl, Castles in the Sky Silicon Valley is a place built on dreams. And there’s no bigger dream powering the Valley than being part of a successful startup and building technology that changes the world. In 2016 I joined a small startup called HashiCorp. The company was founded by two University of Washington CS majors…

We can, and should, build web3. Just not the way you think. — Web3 is one of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley at the moment. For infrastructure technologists it’s also one of the most divisive. Mirroring the mid-2000’s era controversy of its predecessor, Web 2.0, …

Analysis on the 2021 Natanz attacks from someone who responded to Stuxnet — In the early morning of April 11th, 2021 an explosion rocked the desert surrounding Natanz, a nuclear enrichment facility within Iran’s nuclear power infrastructure. …

What I learned from a confusing, painful year It’s been almost four years since my last personal post. And while I planned on doing one for 2020, this wasn’t the post I was planning to write. …

CAVP, CMVP, FIPS 140–3, and why we need a better way to measure good cryptography with ideally less acronyms — Cryptography is critical to protecting our information online. In a pandemic-wracked world where companies and countries are being forced at gunpoint into the digital age, figuring out whether or not some cryptography is “good” enough to use for protecting secrets is a very big problem. Unfortunately there isn’t a commonly…

Why Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) is critical to saving privacy, the economy, and the world — As COVID-19 wracks the world, most countries have enacted some form of non-essential business shutdown and/or social distancing protocols to stop the spread of this lethal virus. …

How solving some of the Millennium Prize Problems may threaten traditional cryptography and information security — The Millennium Prize Problems are a series of mathematical questions that represent hard boundaries in our understanding of mathematics. Answering these questions would rapidly advance our understanding of math — and empower fields like physics, biology, and chemistry accordingly with new tools to describe reality and our universe.

Judging cryptography with Kerkhoff’s Principle — and what that means for security and open source — We have a lot of standards in security. Regulations like GDPR, COPPA, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA are so common that they make their way into the plots of TV shows and movies. …