Biography:
I was currently a principal software engineer at Cloudflare.
I am the inventer of OpenPubkey and develop and maintain the OpenPubkey Linux Foundation project. I do research on network security, cryptography and cryptocurrency.
I was the CTO of BastionZero, a company I co-founded, where I was helping to build the authentication protocols of the future. I joined Cloudflare after BastionZero was acquired by Cloudflare in 2024.
In 2022 I graduated with a Phd from Boston University's Computer Science Department and was member of the security research group BUSec.
Sharon Goldberg was my advisor. At Boston University my research focus was on the RPKI and Bitcoin.
I have done research on novel attacks on hash functions, differential cryptanalysis, Intelligent Transit Systems and cache based side channel attacks.
In 2009 I broke Spectral Hash the SHA3 contestant as part of the NIST Hash Function Competition.
In 2017 I broke Curl-P the hash function used by the cryptocurrency IOTA.
Prior to graduate school I worked as a software engineer at the Broad Institute where I wrote microbial bioinformatics annotation software.
I've also worked as a software developer at two successful startups, Pubget and Jumptap.
My email address is ethan.r.heilman@gmail.com, my github, on mastodon @ethan_heilman@hexagon.space, on twitter @Ethan_Heilman and my CV is available here.
Publications:
Cryptanalysis of Curl-P and Other Attacks on the IOTA Cryptocurrency
Ethan Heilman, Neha Narula, Garrett Tanzer, James Lovejoy, Michael
Colavita, Madars Virza, Tadge Dryja
Vulnerability Disclosure and Proof-of-Concept
FSE2020: IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology (2020), Athens, Greece, November 2020
BlackHat USA (2018), Las Vegas, USA, August 2018
Real World Crypto (2019), San Jose, USA, January 2019
An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain
Malte Möser, Kyle Soska, Ethan Heilman, Kevin Lee, Henry Heffan, Shashvat Srivastava,
Kyle Hogan, Jason Hennessey, Andrew Miller, Arvind Narayanan, and Nicolas Christin
Proceedings on
Privacy Enhancing Technologies,Barcelona, Spain 2018
On the risk of misbehaving RPKI authorities
D Cooper, E Heilman, K Brogle, L Reyzin, S Goldberg
Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, 2013
Awarded a 2014 IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize.
Developing low-cost AVL and Web Mapping for Real-Time Intermodal Customer Information Using a GPS Cell Phones and Google Maps
U Shama, L Harman, E Heilman, J Baltikauskas, NCUR, 2007
Selected Blog Entries:
Play Flip It:
Instructions can be found
here.