Sebastien Awwad
Sr. Security Engineer at Anaconda, Inc.
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSebastien Awwad is a senior security engineer and software supply-chain expert with a decade of experience building resilient trust systems for package and update ecosystems. Based in New York, he has led development and maintenance of reference implementations for The Update Framework (TUF) and Uptane, and drove security and trust metadata work for conda at Anaconda. His work combines hands-on C#/Unix systems programming and incident response with formal secure-design thinking, evidenced by contributions that mitigated attacks like indefinite freeze and strengthened verification on Windows. A former researcher and sysadmin in computational neuroscience, he brings cross-disciplinary rigor and a research mindset to practical security problems. Known in open source circles for stewardship of foundational update security projects, he holds a dual BS in Neuroscience and Computer Science from NYU.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Neuroscience & Computer Science, BS, Neuroscience & Computer Science at New York University
English, French, Japanese, lebanese arabic, Spanish
Github Skills (10)
it-security10
security10
conda10
python10
package-management10
testing10
cryptography9
certificate-revocation9
api8
api-design8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
theupdateframework/python-tuf
Mar 2016 - May 2019
Python reference implementation of The Update Framework (TUF)
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:3 releases, 272 commits, 82 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Sebastien primarily focused on improving the security and robustness of the TUF implementation. They addressed potential vulnerabilities, such as indefinite freeze attacks, through code modifications and enhanced test coverage. The user also expanded and clarified the documentation to better explain the functionality and rationale behind specific features. Furthermore, they made minor logging and comment improvements to clarify code and test behavior.
pythonsecuritycompromiserevocationupdate
conda/conda
Dec 2020 - Apr 2021
A system-level, binary package and environment manager running on all major operating systems and platforms.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 7 commits, 4 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Sebastien primarily focused on enhancing the security and trust mechanisms within the conda package management system. They implemented and refined the framework for retrieving and verifying root and key_mgr trust metadata, crucial for ensuring the integrity of packages. Their contributions included creating initial trust root metadata, adding verification steps, and addressing Windows-specific path issues related to signing. They also made minor bug fixes to improve the robustness of the trust validation processes.
os-agnosticcondaagnosticpackage-managerlinux
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