About The Cryptographer's Cipher

Staff

• Ada Ciphertext

  Founding Editor

  Information security researcher who encrypts her grocery lists and considers plaintext a character flaw.

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  Information security researcher who encrypts her grocery lists and considers plaintext a character flaw.

• Dr. Miriam Ostrowski

  Standards Correspondent

  Provable security researcher on indefinite leave from the Weizmann Institute who believes no cryptographic claim should be published without an explicit security model and a reduction proof, including restaurant recommendations. Miriam covers formal verification, security proofs, and the gap between what schemes promise and what they actually prove. Her rejection of handwaving is so total that she once returned a birthday card for containing the phrase 'unbreakable bond.'

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  Provable security researcher on indefinite leave from the Weizmann Institute who believes no cryptographic claim should be published without an explicit security model and a reduction proof, including restaurant recommendations. Miriam covers formal verification, security proofs, and the gap between what schemes promise and what they actually prove. Her rejection of handwaving is so total that she once returned a birthday card for containing the phrase 'unbreakable bond.'

• Elliot Marchetti

  Civic Affairs Desk

  Retired signals intelligence analyst—agency unspecified, though his detailed opinions about Suite B algorithms narrow it down—who writes with the bone-deep skepticism of someone who has watched promising protocols fail in classified environments he can't reference. Elliot covers protocol design, key negotiation, and operational security, and he has never met a new standard he didn't greet with 'I've seen this movie before.' His colleagues call him Gray. He does not explain why.

  Read full bio

  Retired signals intelligence analyst—agency unspecified, though his detailed opinions about Suite B algorithms narrow it down—who writes with the bone-deep skepticism of someone who has watched promising protocols fail in classified environments he can't reference. Elliot covers protocol design, key negotiation, and operational security, and he has never met a new standard he didn't greet with 'I've seen this movie before.' His colleagues call him Gray. He does not explain why.

• Helmut Breuer

  Culture Columnist

  Former professor of pure mathematics at ETH Zürich who left academia after his department adopted AES-256 for internal email, which he calls 'a computational compromise unworthy of faculty correspondence.' Helmut covers information-theoretic security, key management, and entropy analysis with the warmth of a formal proof. He has never once used the word 'probably' without immediately qualifying it with a confidence interval.

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  Former professor of pure mathematics at ETH Zürich who left academia after his department adopted AES-256 for internal email, which he calls 'a computational compromise unworthy of faculty correspondence.' Helmut covers information-theoretic security, key management, and entropy analysis with the warmth of a formal proof. He has never once used the word 'probably' without immediately qualifying it with a confidence interval.

• Kwame Asante

  Field Reporter

  Ghanaian-British former standup comedian who pivoted to tech writing after a bit about PGP key-signing parties went viral on r/netsec and got more engagement than anything he'd ever performed at Edinburgh Fringe. Kwame covers the absurd theater of everyday encryption—password policies, enterprise key ceremonies, and the ongoing human commitment to protecting grocery lists with military-grade cryptography. He is the only staff writer who has been formally asked to 'please stop calling HMAC a vibe check.'

  Read full bio

  Ghanaian-British former standup comedian who pivoted to tech writing after a bit about PGP key-signing parties went viral on r/netsec and got more engagement than anything he'd ever performed at Edinburgh Fringe. Kwame covers the absurd theater of everyday encryption—password policies, enterprise key ceremonies, and the ongoing human commitment to protecting grocery lists with military-grade cryptography. He is the only staff writer who has been formally asked to 'please stop calling HMAC a vibe check.'

• Malcolm Freed

  Letters Editor

  Former GCHQ archivist who spent eleven years cataloguing declassified signals intelligence before realizing the public stories were more interesting than the classified ones. Malcolm covers the history of cryptanalysis and cipher-breaking with a spy novelist's pacing, always reminding readers that behind every broken code was a humaneli who paid a price. He once described RSA's invention as 'the second time it was invented, and the first time it was allowed to exist.'

  Read full bio

  Former GCHQ archivist who spent eleven years cataloguing declassified signals intelligence before realizing the public stories were more interesting than the classified ones. Malcolm covers the history of cryptanalysis and cipher-breaking with a spy novelist's pacing, always reminding readers that behind every broken code was a humaneli who paid a price. He once described RSA's invention as 'the second time it was invented, and the first time it was allowed to exist.'

• Runa Sigurdsdóttir

  Institutional Memory Desk

  Icelandic electrical engineer and side-channel specialist who came to cryptography not through mathematics but through an oscilloscope. Runa covers physical attacks, power analysis, electromagnetic emanations, fault injection, and every other way a theoretically perfect cipher dies on contact with actual hardware. Her articles average 4,500 words because, as she explains, 'the devil is in the power trace, and the power trace is long.'

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  Icelandic electrical engineer and side-channel specialist who came to cryptography not through mathematics but through an oscilloscope. Runa covers physical attacks, power analysis, electromagnetic emanations, fault injection, and every other way a theoretically perfect cipher dies on contact with actual hardware. Her articles average 4,500 words because, as she explains, 'the devil is in the power trace, and the power trace is long.'

• Soo-jin Park

  Weekend Editor

  Former food and lifestyle blogger who got nerd-sniped by a Diffie-Hellman key exchange explainer on YouTube and never recovered. Soo-jin covers cryptographic protocols with the wide-eyed intensity of someone who learned what a trapdoor function was eighteen months ago and now can't stop asking 'but wait, why do we trust THAT assumption?' Her questions routinely unravel things experts thought were settled.

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  Former food and lifestyle blogger who got nerd-sniped by a Diffie-Hellman key exchange explainer on YouTube and never recovered. Soo-jin covers cryptographic protocols with the wide-eyed intensity of someone who learned what a trapdoor function was eighteen months ago and now can't stop asking 'but wait, why do we trust THAT assumption?' Her questions routinely unravel things experts thought were settled.

• Vera Cipher

  Public Records Fellow

  Retired NSA analyst who now writes cryptography humor, which she insists is a real genre with at least four fans.

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  Retired NSA analyst who now writes cryptography humor, which she insists is a real genre with at least four fans.