These are some of my pet projects that I’ve worked on or currently am hacking away at.
Tenebra
Tenebra was my submission to the Silicon Valley Neat Ideas Fair in 2008, a proposed computer environment that allowed secure communications for consumers on-par with the type of security you’d usually necessary for trusted DoD systems. The idea was this: deny hackers the ability to compromise your system by creating a standalone environment that plugs various holes in typical desktop information security.
Using flash memory and a ROM-stored Linux live installation, Tenebra would never store anything on disk and communicate using an implementation of the Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman algorithm. It incorporates a hardware random number generator to ensure that Diffie-Hellman gets suitably large and random primes, and by not storing anything on disk virii and other malware are inconsequential unless they attack the BIOS (the ROM is transparent to the system) .
Tenebra won 3rd place for the contest’s Executive Summary division. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot from the various VC’s and industry leaders I got a chance to talk to.
Also, as an ancillary benefit, designing Tenebra helped me study for the Information Security class I was in at the time. A huge amount of thanks goes to Dr. Mark Stamp, whose class was really where all of it started.
Here’s some links from the fair:
