Marc Stevens
Senior Researcher Cryptology at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMarc Stevens is a Senior Researcher in Cryptology with over a decade of experience dissecting and hardening cryptographic hash functions, currently based at CWI in Amsterdam. His PhD work and subsequent research pioneered practical analyses of MD5 and SHA-1 collision attacks and informed real-world security assessments of protocols like HTTPS. He combines deep theoretical insight with rigorous engineering—evident in his open-source contributions such as the SHA-1 collision detection library where he refactored and optimized core implementations for robustness and cross-platform compatibility. Active in the Dutch research community and governance roles (DIAMANT board member, former Dutch Blockchain Coalition steering committee), he bridges academic research and applied security practice. Notably, his work has a track record of turning subtle cryptanalytic findings into practical tools and mitigation guidance used by practitioners.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Cryptology, Awarded KHMW Martinus van Marum prize, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Cryptology, Awarded KHMW Martinus van Marum prize at Leiden UniversityMaster, Applied Mathematics, Awarded Best TU/e Master Thesis Award 2008, Master, Applied Mathematics, Awarded Best TU/e Master Thesis Award 2008 at Eindhoven University of Technology
Stackoverflow
1,628reputation
22kreached
15answers
2questions
gpu
top-5%
Github Skills (18)
algorithm10
code-optimization10
algorithms10
endianness10
c1110
c1710
optimisation10
numerical-optimization10
optimization10
refactor9
collision-detection9
gpu9
refactoring9
simd6
cuda6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
cr-marcstevens/sha1collisiondetection
Jan 2017 - Jan 2020
Library and command line tool to detect SHA-1 collision in a file
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 91 commits, 33 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Marc primarily contributed to the core functionality of the SHA-1 collision detection library. Their work involved refactoring and optimizing the SHA-1 implementation, removing SIMD code and unnecessary functions. They also updated the SHA-1 compression algorithm and made code changes to improve compatibility, particularly related to compiler warnings and line endings, demonstrating a focus on code quality and maintainability. Further commits involved fixing bugs and refactoring for big-endian platforms.
command-line-toolsha
cr-marcstevens/m4gb
Jan 2017 - Jan 2018
M4GB: Efficient Groebner Basis algorithm
Contributions:104 commits, 8 PRs, 90 pushes in 1 year
groebner-basis
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.