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“Not everything that can be counted counts.
Not everything that counts can be counted.”
(William Bruce Cameron)
Mgr. Martin Ukrop
Security researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Research on Cryptography and Security at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.
Usable security
My research is about making security usable for IT professionals (developers, system administrators and such) that lack a specialized training in computer security. I focus on cryptographic interfaces (both programmable and command-line) of developer tools and software libraries. Currently, the emphasis is placed on X.509-capable libraries, such as OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS, paying special attention to the process of certificate creation and validation.
Current aim of my research
“I want help developers create more usable security APIs to lower software exploitation.”
Academic and industrial cooperation
I'm a Ph.D. candidate supervised by Vashek Matyas.
My research efforts are supported by Red Hat Czech and co-supervised by Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos.
Furthermore, we cooperate with psychologists from IRTIS.
Randomness evaluation
Before coming to usable security I was interested in randomness testing and helped develop the EACirc project, the automatic problem solver based on circuit-like representation and genetic programming.
It can be utilized as randomness testing tool similar to statistical batteries (NIST STS, Dieaharder, TestU01), for instance for analysis of cryptographic function outputs. It uses supervised learning techniques based on metaheuristics to construct adapted distinguisher of two input data streams. The distinguisher can be represented as hardware-like circuits or algebraic polynomial.
Teaching and supervision
I see deep meaning and responsibility in teaching and have been tutoring seminars and lecturing a few courses for more than 5 years.
I participate in some security courses (Secure coding principles and practices and Laboratory of security and applied cryptography). More importantly, I am much engaged in the local community of student teachers and leading the Teaching Lab course.
Finally, I am still very fond of functional programming (Haskell in particular) and have been teaching Non-Imperative Programming and Seminar on Functional Programming for quite some time.
I have supervised multiple bachelor theses in the fields of computer security, functional programming and programming education.