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About Me

Hi! I work for Google on ChromeOS security. Previously, I worked for 5 years at 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 became involved in the Ubuntu community around Dapper, 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 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.

• IRC. I'm frequently on #ubuntu-devel, #ubuntu-hardened, #ubuntu-motu, and #ubuntu-bugs.

• Security. I work with the Ubuntu Security Team, and have produced many security updates.

• Debian. In addition to my Ubuntu work, I am also a Debian Developer

Outside of Ubuntu, I'm involved in other communities. I am a kernel.org admin, where I work on maintaining the mirror network for the Linux Kernel. I am a lurker/janitor for the Inkscape project, through which I'm also involved in the Open Clip Art Library and Creative Commons. I have presented for two years running at OSCON, and I attend DefCon annually. In 2006 and 2007, with the rest of my team, we won the Capture The Flag security competition.

Software

• Author of Sendpage alphanumeric paging daemon

• Maintainer of Perl Module Device::SerialPort

• Author of mp3cd (as seen in the Linux MP3 CD Burning HOWTO)

• Author of GOPchop MPEG2-PS editor

• Contributor to Inkscape

• Fiddler with lots of other stuff

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've helped implement a great deal of the available Linux Security Features, but there will always be work in other areas (SELinux, AppArmor, 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.

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