Niels Dossche
Doctoral Researcher at Research Foundation Flanders - FWO
Ghent Metropolitan Area Belgium
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNiels Dossche is a doctoral researcher and security-minded software engineer with 11 years of experience, currently pursuing a PhD at Ghent University funded by FWO. He blends deep systems interests—kernels, x86, compilers, and security—with practical contributions to high-profile open-source projects, notably hardening OpenSSL by fixing subtle error-check handling that prevents potential vulnerabilities. A summa cum laude computer science graduate who also volunteers on PHP projects, Niels brings both academic rigor and hands-on code hygiene to research and production codebases. He has a track record of translating low-level systems insight into robust, secure implementations that improve real-world crypto and platform software.
11 years of coding experience
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, summa cum laude, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, summa cum laude at Ghent University
Github Skills (13)
c1710
mtls10
error-handling10
ssl10
tls1210
c1110
openssl10
tls1310
cryptography10
libtls10
security10
code-review9
debugging9
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
openssl/openssl
Jan 2023 - Jan 2023
General purpose TLS and crypto library
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:8 reviews, 9 commits, 25 PRs in 6 days
Contributions summary:Niels's commits primarily focus on identifying and fixing incomplete error checks within the OpenSSL codebase, related to various functions that can return error codes. The changes involve modifying conditional checks to correctly handle all possible error return values, including negative values and zero values. These fixes improve the robustness and reliability of the cryptographic library by ensuring that errors are properly detected and handled, preventing potential vulnerabilities and unexpected behavior.
cryptocryptographyopensslencryptiontls
SharpNative/CSharpLLVM
May 2017 - Sep 2017
An LLVM-based compiler for IL/C# for kernels that compiles to native code
Contributions:100 commits, 96 pushes, 1 branch in 4 months
compilercsharpllvmnative-codekernel
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