I am the CTO of BastionZero, a company I cofounded, where I helping to build the authetication protocols of the future. I currently do research on authentication built using the JSON Web Cryptography suite (JWS, JWT, JWKS) and contribute to bitcoin-core.
In 2022 I graduated with a Phd from Boston University's Computer Science Department and was member of the security research group BUSec. Sharon Goldberg was my advisor. At Boston Univerity my research focus was on the RPKI and Bitcoin. I have done research on novel attacks on hash functions, differential cryptanalysis, Intelligent Transit Systems and cache based side channel attacks. In 2009 I broke Spectral Hash the SHA3 contestant as part of the NIST Hash Function Competition. In 2017 I broke Curl-P the hash function used by the cryptocurrency IOTA.
Prior to graduate school I worked as a software engineer at the Broad Institute where I wrote microbial bioinformatics annotation software.
I've also worked as a software developer at two successful startups, Pubget and Jumptap.
My email address is ethan.r.heilman@gmail.com, my github, on mastodon @ethan_heilman@hexagon.space, on twitter @Ethan_Heilman and my CV is available here.
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