Alexander Maurice Scheel
alexander.m.scheel@gmail.com
cipherboy.com - personal website
he/him
Ann Arbor, MI 48105
Alexander Maurice Scheel
alexander.m.scheel@gmail.com
cipherboy.com - personal website
he/him
Interests in algorithm, protocol, and application development.
Algorithmic specialties include cryptography, boolean satisfiability, and graph theory.
Specializes in PKI, cryptographic engineering, and government certifications.
Leads Vault PKI development, roadmap, and planning.
Advocates for and delivers complex features like ACME, CA rotation, OCSP,
cross-cluster unification, usability, and operator improvements.
Guides and implements Vault's FIPS Inside strategy, developing
patches to internal BoringCrypto and Go toolchain forks.
Strong developer: became top-15 contributor to Vault OSS (1,159 total contributors)
with over 175 accepted changes.
Internally advocates for customer success and security.
Promoted May 2023.
Delivered FIPS and CIS compliance tooling to Ubuntu Advantage customers.
Primary maintainer of JSS a NSS wrapper for Java
Major projects include developing javax.net.ssl support, extending
Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) compatibility, low-level algorithm enablement,
and support of Common Criteria certification.
Development team lead; frequent cross-team and cross-organization contributions.
Contributor to many open source ecosystems including Dogtag PKI, FreeIPA, NSS, OpenSCAP,
MIT Kerberos, fapolicyd, rpminspect, and FreeRADIUS.
Fedora and RHEL maintainer contributing to efforts such as the Stewardship and
Java Maintenance SIGs.
Simplified SME contribution experience to the Compliance as Code project.
95 accepted pull requests to Compliance as Code and 25 accepted pull requests to
OpenSCAP and SCAP Workbench.
Focused on enabling Channel Bindings in MIT Kerberos.
Over 20 accepted pull requests across MIT Kerberos, gssproxy, ding-libs, python-gssapi,
and libverto.
Contributed to improving Kerberos interactions with SSH and NFS
(Red Hat Bugzillas #1199363, #1477231, and #1463665).
Contributes to several open source projects including the Go Toolchain,
NSS,
CryptoMiniSat,
Gitea,
Let's Encrypt Boulder,
cryptofuzz, and
Apache Tomcat.
Publishes over 75 open-source projects
including cmsh, p,
sharg, SSSa libraries,
and many others.
Former Ubuntu Forums contributor with over 600 posts.
Research under Dr. Eric W. Davis (Rozier) and Dr. Clifford Bergman.
Modeling collisions in hash functions as 3-CNF-SAT problems.
Deriving metrics of utilities of collisions to evaluate impact of a collision.
Analyzing breadth of collision malleability.
Improving bounds for second preimage attacks.
Contributing to open access and open source research.
"Measuring Hash Trustworthiness via Collision Utility Metrics: Logical Cryptanalysis of MD4"
A. Scheel and E. Rozier (unpublished)
Cryptographic challenges which attacking insecure assumptions. Completed 54 out of 56 problems in Go.
Various cryptographic algorithms with cross-architecture implementations in C.
TLS 1.2 library implemented in C++ as part of an API-based web framework.
Honors College Project: Collisions in Hash Functions (see above)
Degrees: Computer Science and Mathematics
Honors: ΦΒΚ Junior Inductee, Spring 2017
Honors: magna cum laude & Honors Program
Fall 2017: 1st in site, 4th place overall
National CDC: 1st place - 2016
ISU CDC: 2nd place - Fall 2015
Programming Languages:
C, Java, Python, Go, C++, Bash, Ansible, rpmspec, SQL, HTML5, CSS3, JSX, React, JavaScript, PHP
Operating Systems: Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, occasionally Gentoo
Orchestration: Podman, Docker, KVM, libvirt, AWS, GCE, DigitalOcean, RHEV
Project Management: Git, GitHub, Pagure, Gitea
Protocols and Encodings: TLS, Kerberos, ASN.1, XML, JSON, YAML
Editors: Atom, Brackets, Gedit, Vi, Emacs, Nano, Eclipse, Word, Google Drive
Daemons: Apache httpd, Apache Tomcat, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SSH, Nginx, FreeRADIUS, Kerberos