Nick Kossifidis
👥 1 conference
🎤 1 talk
📅 Years active: 2019 to 2019
Biography
Nick wanted to become a musician, studied Physics and ended up playing with wireless networks, various types of hardware, writing C code (some of it in the Linux Kernel) and doing penetration testing (on IT systems unfortunately). These days he works at a research center in Greece having fun with HPC systems with lots of FPGAs, and tries to get more people involved with RISC-V.
Nick likes SDRs and has a huge interest in Random Number Generators, he would also like to be able to understand more about Cryptography and Quantum Information Theory. As a Physicist he enjoys Quantum Mechanics, Information Theory and Electromagnetism, and is one of the founding members of the University of Crete's astronomy group (although Astrophysics is not really his thing). He's been an active member of the University's radio station as well (where he did some SDR development for the FM transmitter), one of the first members of the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN), a member of the Hellenic Linux User Group, and also an activist with digitalrights.gr and other EU organizations fighting for human rights on the Internet. Although he's been active in various open source projects, he is mostly known for his work on ath5k (the driver for the AR5K series of WiFi cards made by Atheros) where he did most of the reverse engineering work for supporting the later chips on the series. Some people also know him from his work on Firesheep (a tool for demonstrating HTTP session hijacking), especially his friends at the Physics department that were his first test subjects (with consent of course). As a security consultant and researcher, Nick has audited a lot of code, performed penetration testing on various systems (both hardware and software), and developed some PoC exploits in the process (all under NDA so if you ask him he'll neither confirm nor deny their existence).
Conferences
1 known conferences