Torben Hansen
Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTorben Hansen is a Senior Applied Scientist and PhD candidate in Applied Cryptography at Royal Holloway, specializing in secure communication protocols and bridging theory and practice in cryptography. With seven years of experience at AWS Cryptography, he has contributed substantive low-level security work to high-profile open-source projects like s2n-tls and AWS-LC, adding cipher support, hardening DRBG and RSA handling, and fixing subtle memory and fork-detection issues. He codes daily in C, Java and Python across Linux and macOS, bringing a practitioner’s rigor to protocol analysis and cryptographic library engineering. Based in Seattle, he combines academic depth—including a CRYPTO-linked research background—with hands-on production security at scale. Colleagues describe him as proactively solving hard security problems rather than reacting to incidents, a mindset he credits to a Stoic-inspired view on time and priorities.
7 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Applied Cryptography, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Applied Cryptography at Royal Holloway, University of LondonMaster of Science (M.Sc.) Mathematics and Computer Science, Master of Science (M.Sc.) Mathematics and Computer Science at Aarhus University
Danish, English, Swedish, Norwegian
Github Skills (19)
crypto10
ssl10
tls1210
c1110
tls1310
rsa10
security10
c1710
mtls10
c9910
openssl10
cryptography10
libtls10
boringssl10
encryption10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
aws/aws-lc
Aug 2020 - Jan 2023
AWS-LC is a general-purpose cryptographic library maintained by the AWS Cryptography team for AWS and their customers. It іs based on code from the Google BoringSSL project and the OpenSSL project.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Security Engineer
Back-end Developer / Security EngineerContributions:8 releases, 1690 reviews, 78 commits in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Torben implemented and extended cryptographic functions and structures, focusing on TLS and RSA key handling within the AWS-LC cryptographic library. They extended TLS EC point encoding/decoding functions to support the EVP_PKEY_EC key type and also implemented support for 8192 bit RSA key. Furthermore, the user fixed potential NULL-dereference vulnerabilities and improved the handling of RDRAND failures, demonstrating a focus on security and robustness within the library.
cryptographycryptographiccustomerspurposeaws
aws/s2n-tls
Aug 2020 - Jun 2022
An implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:131 reviews, 29 commits, 43 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Torben primarily contributed to the core functionality of the s2n-tls library, focusing on implementing and refining TLS/SSL protocol implementations. Their work involved low-level code modifications, including the addition of AWS-LC preprocessor directives, support for various cipher suites (ChaCha20-Poly1305, AES-GCM, and X25519), and improvements to the DRBG (Deterministic Random Bit Generator). They also addressed security-related issues, fixing macro usage, indexing, and magic numbers, in addition to fixing potential issues around the fork detection to increase the overall security.
cryptographysslc99tlscrypto
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.