Tobias Heider
Software Engineer at Canonical
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Summary
🤩
RockstarTobias Heider is a seasoned software engineer based in Munich with 11 years of experience focused on low-level systems, security, and embedded development. He is an active open-source contributor and maintainer across major projects—working on OpenBSD internals (notably IKEv2/IPsec in iked), hardening Portable OpenSSH against memory and integer vulnerabilities, and improving core functionality in the RIOT OS for IoT devices. Tobias combines a security-first mindset with practical systems programming skills in C, routinely addressing subtle bugs like allocation failures, double fclose issues, and integer overflows. His contributions reflect deep familiarity with Unix-like platforms and a track record of improving stability and safety in widely used, security-critical codebases. An uncommon strength is his cross-domain experience from kernel-level networking to constrained embedded allocators, making him effective at both audit-driven fixes and feature work in resource-tight environments.
11 years of coding experience
Github Skills (21)
system-programming10
memory-management10
internet-of-things10
c-programming10
c1110
microcontroller10
osdev10
security10
c1710
iot10
rtos10
sys10
cryptography10
embedded10
macos10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
openssh/openssh-portable
Dec 2019 - Jun 2022
Portable OpenSSH
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Security Engineer
Back-end Developer / Security EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 6 commits, 1 PR in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tobias's commits primarily focus on improving the security and robustness of OpenSSH. They address memory allocation vulnerabilities by replacing `strdup` with `xstrdup`, which handles allocation failures more safely. Furthermore, the user contributes to fixing potential integer overflows, preventing double `fclose` calls and reducing log spam. The commits suggest an understanding of low-level system programming and security best practices.
cryptographykeychainsecuritysshfile-sharing
RIOT-OS/RIOT
Jul 2017 - Apr 2018
RIOT - The friendly OS for IoT
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 8 PRs, 63 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Tobias contributed to the RIOT OS, a friendly OS for IoT devices, by fixing fallthrough warnings in the `pkg/heatshrink` and `gnrc/sock` modules. They also added a `random_bytes` function within the `random` module, and a fixed-size memory block allocator, along with an associated test. The contributions indicate work on low-level system functionalities.
riot-osinternetofthingsrtosriotmicrocontrollers
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