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I am a principal software engineer at Upbound.
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The Tragedy of the Oxide Root of Trust

2026-11-05 15:41:34

I have spent a significant portion of my career focused on helping folks securely manufacture, deploy, and manage the lifecycle of connected devices. I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say that my professional mission in life is to dramatically improve the status quo of device security. I recently changed jobs in service of that mission. While there is a fair amount of essential complexity in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which underpins many of the components of a secure device, a significant reason why securely manufacturing devices is so hard is because no one talks about it.

Your MCU Likely Escaped the eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise

2026-10-21 15:41:34

If you are a software engineer, or generally work in the tech industry, there is a good chance that you heard about the eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise that was disclosed yesterday (October 20, 2026). If you don’t, you may have noticed an uptick in software updates for various products that you use. I won’t go through the entire background of the situation as there are plenty of other posts, including the now public bug report from Mozilla, that describe the details of the compromise.

What's on that Access Port?

2026-10-07 15:41:34

In my last post, I wrote about debugging the Nordic Semiconductor nRF54LM20 when a peripheral, specifically the Key Management Unit (KMU), writes directly to memory while the CPU is halted. Or I should really say that I wrote about debugging the application core (Cortex-M33), as the nRF54LM20 also has a RISC-V coprocessor (VPR) referred to as the Fast Lightweight Peripheral Processor (FLPR). Around the time that Nordic announced the VPR core, I wrote two posts; one about its architecture and the other about how communication works between it and an application core.

When the Debugger Lies

2026-09-18 15:41:34

I’ve spent the last few weeks working with the security architecture of the nRF54L series from Nordic Semiconductor (in case you missed it, I recently joined Nordic!). While doing so, I have engaged my typical low-level learning technique of eschewing writing firmware for manually poking at registers using the debugger. A few nights ago I found myself observing unexpected values in memory when working with the key management unit. It turned out to be a familiar issue, but one that requires an understanding of the internal system on chip (SoC) components, and how the debugger interacts with them, to diagnose.

Farewell Golioth... and Hello Nordic!

2026-08-24 15:41:34

Friday was my last day at Golioth (and Canonical), and today is my first day at Nordic Semiconductor! It has been an interesting journey to say the least, but before diving into what drew me to Nordic, I would be remiss not to briefly reflect on my time at Golioth. I joined Golioth after a few years at Upbound, where I spent the majority of my time working on the open source Crossplane project, before eventually moving over to lead teams that built Upbound Cloud and the Upbound Marketplace.

The Simple Elegance of the Integrated Timing Belt Loopback Fastener

2026-07-31 15:41:34

I’ve recently been working on a mechatronics project that involves constructing an X-Y cartesian motion system. I opted to use stepper motors to drive each axis, and timing belts and pulleys for translating the rotational torque of the steppers into linear motion. The timing belts need to be anchored to the component that is being actuated, which in this case is the carriage on the linear rails. Though matching toothed clamps exist, it is common, particularly in DIY projects, for timing belts to be fastened using zip ties or custom clips.