Ivan Krstić
krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu
I took a leave of absence from the academia to work as director of security architecture at One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit trying to save the world by fixing education. This means I'm paid to be paranoid, which I imagine some psychiatrists might find funny.
I enjoy breaking computers. I enjoy making computers hard to break even more. Unfortunately, most people are really bad at the latter. At OLPC, I've put a lot of work into Bitfrost (technical details), which is a system for securing computers that's trying to be both hard to break and easy to use. If this proves successful, a future version will make ice cream fall from the sky.
People apparently like to hear me blab. Recently, I keynoted MassTLC's Open Source summit which was, amusingly, hosted by Microsoft, and gave an opening keynote at AusCERT which was held in a land where everyone speaks with a funny accent. Before that, I delivered a keynote at PyCon where people declared me their favorite blabber at the conference. I also moderated a discussion session and presented a paper at SOUPS and keynoted SciPy. In the future, I'll be giving a keynote at ACM's IEEII. If you'd like to join the fan club, you can watch a recent blab I gave at Google about my work and the awesome technology in the OLPC laptops.
I'm a big believer in open source, which is an ancient African phrase meaning "no, I will not fix your Windows computer for you." I've been using Linux since before it was cool, and recently co-wrote the official book about my distribution of choice. Before Ubuntu, I was a loyal Debian user, despite occasionally venturing to the dark side. I make servers do neat tricks, and like to do so with Python.
Outside of security, I specialize in systems architecture and scalability. I'm also interested in road cycling, world history, and abusing mathematics.