Tom Yu
Development Team Leader at MIT Kerberos Consortium
Greater Boston Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Yu is a development team leader with 32 years of systems and security engineering experience, currently guiding development at the MIT Kerberos Consortium. He combines deep applied-cryptography and network-security expertise (Kerberos, GSS-API, ASN.1) with low-level systems skills in C and assembly across MIPS, SPARC, and x86, plus hands-on release engineering and Unix tooling. Tom has a long track record of improving reliability and testability in critical open-source projects—contributions include hardening Tor tests and fixing base64 buffer issues, enhancing ARM Cortex debugging in Blackmagic, and firmware and power-management fixes for Keyboardio keyboards. He mentors engineering teams from design through QA while staying active in community projects (former krb5 and Tor contributor, occasional rust-lang, Adafruit, and Keyboardio work), reflecting a balance of standards-driven protocol work and pragmatic embedded systems fixes. An MIT Aeronautics & Astronautics grad, he brings an uncommon mix of cryptographic protocol design, legacy systems knowledge, and embedded-hardware debugging to complex, security-sensitive software stacks.
32 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
S.B., Aeronautics/Astronautics, S.B., Aeronautics/Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (32)
unit-testing10
debugging10
debug10
c-language10
architecture10
testing10
firmware10
c-programming10
c1110
base64-encoding10
c1710
sys10
arm10
embedded10
error-handling10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
torproject/tor
Mar 2017 - Feb 2020
unofficial git repo -- report bugs/issues/pull requests on https://gitlab.torproject.org/ --
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:166 commits, 78 PRs, 3 pushes in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Tom's commits primarily focused on enhancing the test suite for the Tor project. They added new test cases to `test_circuitbuild.c`, aimed at testing the `new_route_len()` and `route_len_for_purpose()` functions and their handling of circuit purposes, including edge cases involving chosen exits. Furthermore, the user updated existing tests, expanded test coverage and refactored code for better testability. The user also made improvements to the existing base64 encoding and decoding functions, fixing a potential buffer overflow bug and increasing the test coverage to cover more cases.
rustsecurityreportgitlabpull-requests
blackmagic-debug/blackmagic
Feb 2023 - Oct 2024
In application debugger for ARM Cortex microcontrollers.
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:15 reviews, 7 PRs, 61 comments in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily focused on debugging and improving the functionality of the `blackmagic` debugger for ARM Cortex microcontrollers. Their contributions included fixing DFU detach issues related to USB pullup and GPIO configuration. The user addressed SWD turnaround problems by adding delay loops and ensuring consistent clock states. Furthermore, they enhanced the debugger by adding idle SWD cycles and fixing flash erase procedures.
cortexstlinkjtagflashdebugger
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