Rob Crittenden
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat
Linthicum, Maryland, United States
Summary
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RockstarRob Crittenden is a Principal Software Engineer based in Linthicum, Maryland with over 21 years of experience building secure, production-grade back-end systems. At Red Hat he focuses on identity, certificate management, and cloud infrastructure tooling, contributing to high-profile open-source projects like FreeIPA, Dogtag PKI, and OpenStack (Tempest and DevStack). His work blends deep security engineering—SSL/TLS, CA handling, HSM and NSS integrations—with practical DevOps improvements that make complex systems testable and operable. Rob is comfortable diving into legacy code to fix subtle bugs and edge cases, from ACI plugin improvements to SSL client validation flags. He brings long tenure in enterprise environments (Netscape, AOL/Time Warner) and a track record of shipping reliable, auditable features that improve usability and security. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic, behind-the-scenes fixes that keep critical infrastructure running.
21 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (27)
ldap10
ssl10
tls1210
cert10
python10
back-end-development10
testing10
configuration-management10
bash10
tls1310
security10
pest10
certificate10
openstack10
temper10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
freeipa/freeipa
Aug 2007 - Nov 2022
Mirror of FreeIPA, an integrated security information management solution
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:644 reviews, 2794 commits, 1739 PRs in 15 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Rob primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the FreeIPA security information management solution. Their contributions involved modifying and extending the Access Control Instructions (ACI) plugin to break out ACI entries into attributes, validate parameter types, and enhance display options. They also contributed to the user and service management plugins by adding features such as displaying account status and enforcing proper casing. The user's work improved the usability and security of the FreeIPA system, mainly by modifying existing code and adding new features.
freeipasecuritypythonlinuxcertificates
dogtagpki/pki
Feb 2021 - Nov 2022
The Dogtag Certificate System is an enterprise-class Certificate Authority (CA) which supports all aspects of certificate lifecycle management, including key archival, OCSP and smartcard management.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:13 reviews, 12 commits, 15 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Rob primarily contributed to the Dogtag Certificate System, focusing on backend improvements related to certificate management and security. Their work involved fixing healthcheck options, using specific token names for SSL server certificates, and disabling return value checks in the NSS database to address a bug, indicating a deep understanding of the system's inner workings. The user also added user and group options to the NSSDatabase class and provided fixes to enhance HSM installation, demonstrating a focus on secure key management and filesystem permissions.
certificate-authorityocspsmartcarddogtag-pkica
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