Felipe Da N Costa
Founder - Chief Technology Officer at KonaSense
Cambridge, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFelipe Da N Costa is a seasoned security engineer and founder with 16 years of experience building defensive systems, currently leading KonaSense as CTO to deliver people-first AI governance, security, and observability. He is a Principal-level consultant and former lead developer of ModSecurity/libModSecurity with deep expertise in web application firewalls, vulnerability research, and hardening at scale—contributions that touched a widely used OWASP project with thousands of stars and forks. His background spans embedded and mobile security, firmware threat modeling, fuzzing, and kernel/SELinux work, reflecting rare full-stack security fluency from hardware to cloud. Felipe combines rigorous academic training (PhD in Blockchain) with hands-on C/C++ systems engineering and long-running open source stewardship, reviewing hundreds of PRs and driving stability and memory-safety fixes. Known for leading technical teams and multi-month client engagements, he pairs forensic attention to detail with pragmatic product delivery. He often surfaces subtle interoperability and build-system issues early—an attribute that has repeatedly improved reliability across complex security projects.
16 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Engineer Computer Engineering, Engineer Computer Engineering at Universidade de PernambucoDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Blockchain, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Blockchain at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Portuguese, German, English
Stackoverflow
11reputation
670reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (17)
debug10
waf10
headers10
memory-management10
c1110
c1710
modsecurity10
nginx10
gnu-make9
debugging9
security9
makefile9
build-system9
logging9
json8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
owasp-modsecurity/ModSecurity
Sep 2013 - Jul 2021
ModSecurity is an open source, cross platform web application firewall (WAF) engine for Apache, IIS and Nginx. It has a robust event-based programming language which provides protection from a range of attacks against web applications and allows for HTTP traffic monitoring, logging and real-time analysis.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:12 releases, 9 reviews, 860 commits in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Felipe primarily contributed to the ModSecurity project by fixing bugs and improving the build process. They addressed a missing string terminator in the nginx configuration and modified the build system to look for yajl using a macro file, thereby removing the direct dependency on pkg-config. They also fixed a parser error related to operator negation and addressed multiple memory management issues within the code, further suggesting a focus on code stability and security improvements. Additionally, they added the support to the `REMOTE_USER` and `STATUS` variable, demonstrating an engagement with server-side configuration.
nginxweb-applicationloggingapache2waf
owasp-modsecurity/ModSecurity-nginx
Mar 2016 - Sep 2020
ModSecurity v3 Nginx Connector
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 18 commits, 43 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Felipe focused on enhancing the ModSecurity Nginx connector, primarily working on the backend code. Their contributions involved addressing response headers, adding debug messages for improved logging and troubleshooting, and modifying the handling of request and response bodies. They also made adjustments for compatibility with ModSecurity 2.0.3 and added some versioning updates.
nginxconnectormodsecurity-nginxwafmodsecurity
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.