Christian Huitema - President at Private Octopus Inc.

Christian Huitema

President at Private Octopus Inc.

Friday Harbor, Washington, United States

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Summary

👤

Senior

🎓

Top School

Christian Huitema is a veteran Internet architect and entrepreneur with over four decades in software and more than 30 years shaping core Internet protocols, including contributions to IPv6, VoIP standards, and QUIC. After a long tenure as a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft—where he led work on NAT traversal (Teredo), Wi‑Fi architecture, privacy features in Windows 10, and computer vision projects—he founded Private Octopus Inc. to pursue consulting, research, and protocol development from his home in the San Juan Islands. Hands‑on across research and implementation, he has ported TLS 1.3 to Windows, advanced minimal QUIC implementations, and improved cross‑platform DNS tooling, showing a rare blend of standards influence and systems-level coding. He holds a PhD in Computer Science, led INRIA research on Internet video in the 1990s, and was Chief Scientist at Telcordia focusing on Internet QoS and telephony scale. Pragmatic about avoiding permanent corporate roles, he offers deep protocol, privacy and interoperability expertise for remote engagements. An interesting throughline: he combines high‑level standards leadership with low‑level portability fixes, from RFCs to Visual Studio builds.

11 years of coding experience

21 years of employment as a software developer

Engineer’s Degree, Engineer’s Degree at École Polytechnique

PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI)

French

Github Skills (25)

wp-api10

windows10

c-programming10

winapi10

c1110

tls1310

c1710

dns10

openssl10

network-protocol10

ws-api10

data-structure9

multiplatform9

socket-io9

cross-platform9

Programming languages (8)

C++ShellBikeshedCRustMakefileRubyPython

Github contributions (5)

private-octopus/picoquic

Jun 2017 - Jan 2023

Minimal implementation of the QUIC protocol

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:177 reviews, 3759 commits, 1885 PRs in 5 years 7 months

Contributions summary:Christian made substantial modifications to the Minimal implementation of the QUIC protocol. The contributions included updates to ACK frequency frames and options, changes to the stream and general header parsing, and the addition of logic for handling the BDP frame and path identifier. These changes demonstrate a focus on improving the core functionality and features of the QUIC protocol implementation, specifically around performance optimization and path management.

protocolquicietfblockchain

h2o/picotls

Jun 2017 - Dec 2022

TLS 1.3 implementation in C (master supports RFC8446 as well as draft-26, -27, -28)

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:41 reviews, 284 commits, 117 PRs in 5 years 6 months

Contributions summary:Christian primarily focused on porting the picotls TLS 1.3 implementation to the Windows platform. Their work involved adapting code to Windows-specific APIs and compatibility layers. The user also made modifications to support the compilation of the code with Visual Studio and to include necessary libraries like OpenSSL. They also implemented functionality for extracting secrets and testing, and the integration of base64, ASN1, and FFX algorithms.

cryptographysslocsptlsmaster

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