Bob Beck is a veteran software engineer and security architect with 28 years of experience, blending deep open-source stewardship at the OpenBSD Project with industry roles at Google and Apple. He specializes in cryptography, TLS/X.509 verification, and portable security libraries—having contributed to LibreSSL portability and helped extract Chrome’s X.509 verifier into BoringSSL for open sourcing. Comfortable across kernel and user-space, his background spans network daemons, filesystems, PKI at scale, and exploit mitigation techniques like pledge/unveil. He has led teams and projects from hands-on kernel work to large-scale PKI and infrastructure at iCloud and Chrome, and served as a volunteer director supporting OpenBSD’s nonprofit operations. Based in Edmonton, Bob pairs academic training (MSc, University of Alberta) with practical consulting and teaching, and is known for pragmatic, detail-oriented fixes that keep critical security primitives portable and maintainable.
LibreSSL Portable itself. This includes the build scaffold and compatibility layer that builds portable LibreSSL from the OpenBSD source code. Pull requests or patches sent to tech@openbsd.org are welcome.
Role in this project:
Back-end & Security Engineer
Contributions:21 commits, 1 PR, 1 push in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Bob primarily contributed to the build process and compatibility layers of LibreSSL, focusing on maintaining the portability of the project. Their work involved updating build scripts and fixing issues related to including necessary header files and dependencies like `opensslfeatures.h`. They also addressed compatibility issues for platforms like Solaris 10 and removed obsolete files. Furthermore, they added a public signing key to the repository.
libtls tutorial, exercises, test CA and exercise solutions
Contributions:127 commits, 15 PRs, 102 pushes in 3 months
libtls
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