Kai Michaelis
Head Of Platform Engineering
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKai Michaelis is a Head of Platform Engineering and serial founder with 13 years of experience building secure platforms, cryptographic systems, and low-level tooling from Kuala Lumpur. He blends hands-on C++ and Rust development—contributing to notable projects like the Botan cryptography toolkit and the Sequoia OpenPGP stack—with leadership roles driving platform reliability and security at BINARLY, immune GmbH, and 9elements. Kai’s background includes shipping TPM and OpenPGP implementations, designing key-derivation integrations, and debugging AMD64 disassembly semantics, reflecting deep expertise in applied cryptography and static program analysis. He cofounded the Open Source Firmware Foundation and Niche Systems, showing a pattern of turning security research into sustainable open-source projects and companies. Colleagues describe him as someone who moves fluidly between architecture and code, often tackling the subtle protocol and algorithmic corners that others avoid.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS IT Security / Information Engineering, Master of Science - MS IT Security / Information Engineering at Ruhr University BochumAbitur, Abitur at Max-Eyth-Schule Kirchheim/Teck
Github Skills (19)
crypto10
c-language10
architecture10
computer-architecture10
crypt10
x50910
cryptography10
instruction-set10
reverse-engineering10
cprogramming-language10
architectures10
tls129
tls139
hmac9
code-generation9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
das-labor/panopticon
Aug 2012 - Jan 2019
A libre cross-platform disassembler.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1485 commits, 195 PRs, 378 pushes in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Kai implemented and debugged features related to AMD64 instruction set disassembling, including adding and updating code for various instructions like `adc`, `and`, `bswap`, `call`, `jmp`, etc. They were responsible for correctly interpreting the semantics of the target instructions and integrating the necessary RREIL code, and they fixed several bugs within the AMD64 disassembly process. Further, the user worked on unifying opcode handling, suggesting a focus on efficiency and maintainability.
windowslibrelinuxqt5disassembler
randombit/botan
Jan 2016 - Oct 2016
Cryptography Toolkit
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 5 PRs, 11 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Kai contributed to the Botan cryptography toolkit by implementing X.509 name constraints, adding support for NIST SP800-108 and SP800-56c key derivation functions, and including tests. The changes involve modifications to the C++ source code, including header files and core functionality related to cryptographic algorithms and key management. The user also integrated the KDF functionality and made label parameter to KDF::derive_key.
cryptographycryptography-librarycryptanalysistlsc-plus-plus
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