Nick Sullivan
Member at Blind Insight
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNick Sullivan is a technology leader and cryptography expert with 12+ years of experience building secure, high-performance internet systems, from Apple DRM to founding Cloudflare Research and leading cryptography at Cloudflare. He combines deep academic training in mathematics and cryptography with hands-on engineering—authoring core open-source tools like CFSSL and Red October and contributing significant API and testing improvements. A prolific communicator, he’s published influential papers, spoken at top conferences, and been widely quoted in outlets such as Nature, NYT and WIRED. Nick now advises and invests in early-stage security and privacy startups, while serving on governance bodies including the IAB and co-chairing the IRTF Crypto Forum Research Group. His work often blends practical engineering (optimizing trillion-transaction services) with forward-looking research (post-quantum and searchable encryption). Colleagues know him for turning complex cryptographic ideas into production-ready, auditable systems and for a knack for clear public-facing technical writing.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Professional Certificate, Advanced Computer Security, Professional Certificate, Advanced Computer Security at Stanford UniversityMSc, Computer Science and Mathematics with a specialization in Cryptography, MSc, Computer Science and Mathematics with a specialization in Cryptography at University of CalgaryBMath (With Distinction), Pure Mathematics, Combinatorics and Optimization, BMath (With Distinction), Pure Mathematics, Combinatorics and Optimization at University of Waterloo
English, French
Github Skills (13)
testing10
json10
error-handling10
go10
api10
apidoc10
encryption10
security10
api-design9
restful-api9
pki9
rest-api9
api-rest9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
cloudflare/redoctober
Oct 2013 - Feb 2017
Go server for two-man rule style file encryption and decryption.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:77 commits, 43 PRs, 41 pushes in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the back-end logic of the "redoctober" project, focusing on creating and testing core functionalities such as account creation, password management, and encryption/decryption. Their work involved using the Go programming language, implementing test cases, and integrating various components like a passvault, keycache, and a testing framework. The changes included modifications to core_test.go, passvault_test.go and cryptor/cryptor_test.go demonstrating expertise in testing and the core logic of the application.
golangrulego-serverpaddingfile-encryption
cloudflare/cfssl
Jul 2014 - Mar 2016
CFSSL: Cloudflare's PKI and TLS toolkit
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:90 commits, 79 PRs, 133 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Nick contributed to the `cfssl` repository, primarily focusing on improvements to the API and core functionality. Their work involved refactoring error reporting within the API to provide more informative responses, including HTTP status codes and error codes. They also addressed issues related to default file paths and improved the overall structure of the API, indicating a strong understanding of the project's architecture. These changes show a focus on improving the reliability and usability of the CFSSL toolkit.
sslpkicloudflaretlsgo
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