Thomas Ptacek

Rating

Domains

Scouting report

Co-wrote the 1998 paper with Timothy Newsham showing that a network IDS which reassembles traffic differently from the host it protects can be walked straight past — the work that forced every vendor to rethink normalisation. Co-founded Matasano and later Latacora, and wrote the Cryptopals challenges that taught a generation how crypto actually breaks.

Curator’s note

One paper made every IDS vendor rewrite their TCP stack.

Portrait

Painted from a photograph of Thomas Ptacek by cfournie, licensed CC BY 2.0.

Sources

• 01Insertion, Evasion, and Denial of Service (1998) insecure.org
• 02The Cryptopals crypto challenges cryptopals.com