Drew Hintz
Member Of Technical Staff at The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDrew Hintz is a seasoned security and software engineer with 16 years of experience blending product security, vulnerability discovery, and people management across companies from Google and the NSA to Block and OpenAI. He builds and leads teams that span detection & response, offensive security, and product security while remaining a hands-on engineer who reverse-engineers, hunts threats, and ships secure software. Drew has helped scale Google's Threat Analysis Group from a handful of engineers into a large intel organization and co-founded their penetration testing program, personally running 60+ tests. He contributes to impactful open-source projects such as comma.ai’s openpilot and panda—bringing embedded/CAN-bus expertise to real-world automotive autonomy—and has optimized cryptographic tooling at Google. Based in Austin, he teaches ethical hacking at UT Austin, reflecting a commitment to mentoring the next generation of security practitioners. Known for pragmatic technical leadership, he often pairs low-level reverse engineering with product-minded fixes that reduce risk across large, distributed systems.
16 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BS Electrical Engineering, BS Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at AustinKingwood HSComputer Science, Computer Science at Stanford University
Stackoverflow
533reputation
67kreached
4answers
1question
Github Skills (33)
algorithms10
2factor10
javascript10
openpgp10
bzip10
python10
user-interface10
java10
system10
javas10
driver10
sys10
android10
authenticator10
cryptography10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
google/end-to-end
Jul 2014 - Feb 2019
End-To-End is a crypto library to encrypt, decrypt, digital sign, and verify signed messages (implementing OpenPGP)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:160 commits, 62 PRs, 53 pushes in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Drew primarily focused on improving the performance and functionality of the End-to-End cryptographic library. Their contributions include optimizing the IteratedS2K algorithm, adding support for the CTR cipher mode, and fixing bugs related to key handling and data encryption. The user's work also involved expanding the library to include the OTR protocol. This involved adding new message types and deconstruction of messages.
crypto-librarycryptographyend-to-endsignopenpgp
commaai/panda
Nov 2017 - Apr 2020
code powering the comma.ai panda
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 11 PRs, 26 comments in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Drew primarily contributed to the `commaai/panda` repository by developing and modifying Python scripts related to analyzing and interacting with CAN bus data. Their work focused on creating tools for logging, analyzing message uniqueness, and replaying recorded CAN traffic. They also implemented Chrysler-specific safety features and tests, demonstrating expertise in vehicle communication protocols and embedded systems.
pandacommapython
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