provos@umich.edu (PGP Public Key)

www.flickr.com This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Random Photos. Make your own badge here. Pictures   Software Engineer at Google. I received a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Diplom in Mathematik from the Universität Hamburg. My curriculum vitae (Publications, Presentations). Wishlists: Books, Music A few daily notes.

Short List of Interests: Steganography: Detection and Prevention of Detection.   Press Information. Steganography Trophy.   Scanning USENET for Steganography. Computer and Network Security - Cryptography - ...   TLS for Sendmail  SSH Vulnerability Scan   Privilege Separated OpenSSH Network Rhapsody with Honeyd   Secure Web Passwords Reading SciFi and Fantasy: Sargons Schatz Listing to music (help increasing my collection), Aikido, Dancing ... Words with capital P: Philosophy, Poetry, ... Bread Baking Experiment Programming: C and everything else Trekking and travelling: Australia Travel Report

Information Attrition

at.tri.tion \*-'trish-*n\ \-'trish-n*l, -'trish-*n-*l\ n [L attrition-, attritio, fr. attritus, pp. of atterere] [ME attricioun, fr. (assumed) ML attrition-, attritio, fr. L]to rub against, fr. ad- + terere to rub - more at THROW 1: sorrow for one's sins that arises from a motive other than that of the love of God 2: the act of rubbing together : FRICTION; also : the act of wearing or grinding down by friction 3: the act of weakening or exhausting by constant harassment or abuse - at.tri.tion.al aj

Some research that I do and projects that I work on:

• Netlayout, a physics driven network topology visualization tool.
• Systrace, interactive policy generation for system calls. Supports Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
  • Policy Repository.
• Honeyd, a virtual honeynet daemon with personality. [Honeyd Honeypot Development]
  • Worm Defense With Honeyd
• Privilege Separated OpenSSH, preventing privilege escalation.
• libio, a simple library that abstracts data transport into data sources and data sinks connected via multiple filters.
• Stegdetect, an automated tool for detecting steganographic content in images. This steganography detector is capable of detecting: jsteg, jphide, and outguess 0.13b. It includes stegbreak, a tool that launches dictionary attacks against steganographic systems and xsteg, a graphical frontend to stegdetect.
• Vomit, Voice Over Misconfigured Internet Telephones.
• Crawl, A Small and Efficient HTTP crawler.
• libevent, a simple library for callbacks on I/O events. It includes support for kqueue.
• ScanSSH, a fast open proxy and SSH Version scanner.
• OpenSSH, a free implementation of the SSH protocols.
• OutGuess, a universal steganography program, allowing for deniability, best image fits and more. It's core is independant of the cover data format.
• NetBSD, a portable UNIX-like operating system.

Privilege Separation and Systrace are part of my effort to improve Cyber Security.

For those of us who are favored with an understanding of the German language, two rather old writings of mine:

• A short article I was asked to write for a magazine about the Internet. It is written in German.
• A seminar talk for the Physics Deparment at the University of Hamburg: Thermodynamik und Nachhaltigkeit. Also in German.

To keep my creative chaos in reign I also maintain some notes, on things I have done, want to follow up on, or think are interesting in general. Recently, I also started Age of Ignorance to document some of the developments that lead to stifled innovation and the restriction of knowledge.