Tech Solvency / Royce Williams

Hi!

I'm Royce Williams. I work in information security. Tech Solvency is where I conduct independent research. I live in Anchorage, Alaska with my family.

I am a public-interest technologist at heart. I believe that the keepers of technology should first do no harm (though second-order effects mean trade-offs - for example, a surgeon does some "harm" cutting into a patient, for the patient's own good). Shostack's concept of cyber public health aligns with my feelings here.

This page informs assessment of my digital presence.

Significant summaries

• keybase.io/royce
• linkedin.com/in/roycewilliams
• techsolvency.com - including password auditing in Anchorage or remote
• My password-cracking gig profile on Upwork

Research and professional interests

• Passwords - auditing, hashing, and history (especially descrypt). I am a member of Team Hashcat (as TychoTithonus), and I make minor GitHub contributions and file bugs and features as roycewilliams
• Regional cyber event and incident management and response
• Asset detection and classification - passive, active, and via harvesting data from other systems and human processes
• TLS - auditing and hardening
• Vulnerability detection and mitigation - practical operational approaches
• DNS - auditing, true-up, automation, and data mining
• NTP
• Talks I have given

Handles

• tychotithonus (Gravatar, Twitter)
  • Origin: see tycho.org and Tithonus
  • Pronunciation: /ˈtaɪkoʊ tɪˈθoʊnəs/ ("TIE-co TITH-oh-nuss") (long "i" in "Tycho", short "i" and stress on the first syllable in "Tithonus").
    But just "Tycho" is fine. :)
• tycho / tychotithonus (Libera IRC)
• akroyce (eBay)
• royce (Disqus, Hacker News, hashcat forums, Keybase, Wikipedia)
• roycewilliams (GitHub, LinkedIn, Reddit)
• royce.williams (Google)
• tychotithonus#7013 (Discord)
• For an exhaustive list with links, see the left column ("Stalker One-Stop Shopping") of my blog.

Catchphrase

"Just doing my undue diligence." (In the ha ha only serious tradition.)

Twitter Policy

I have a Twitter-specific landing page (interests, policies, and sample tweets).

Posts

I have been online since I was 17, so judge accordingly.

• I have a small footprint on StackExchange.
• GitHub gists - hashcat-related items, test results and data snippets in support of public security issues, etc.
• Forums and lists: AKLUG (Alaska Linux Users Group), hashcat, NANOG posts (Google search)
• Searching for my email addresses (royce@alaska.net, royce@tycho.org, royce.williams@acsalaska.net, royce.williams@gmail.com, royce@techsolvency.com) provides an interesting sample of other listserv posts (though with the attrition of Usenet -> Google Groups archives, they are becoming rare)

Memberships

• ACM
• InfraGard
• SANS Advisory Board
• USENIX and the SIG formerly known as SAGE

Undue diligence that I'm proud of: professional ...

• Littera Delenda Est: On the Removal of Files with Unusual Characters in Their Filenames (a guest post in the Unix Review "Shell Corner" column, May 2007) part 1 and part 2
• Deciphering acronyms for NetApp disk shelf configuration options (ServerFault answer)
• FreeBSD LSI SAS9211-8i HBA firmware notes
• Juniper/NetBSD sha1crypt - hashcat feature request
• User selection of saved statuses for the quick/popular list (Pidgin feature request, 2009)
• Operational analysis of POODLE / SSLv3
• Using hashcat to bruteforce German words [utf8] (Security StackExchange answer)
• Don't try to out-hash the hashers (necromancer-grade PHPFreaks forums reply)
• A summary of basic password knowledge - interview study sheet (Reddit request)
• hashcat VeraCrypt test containers
• I didn't code rling, but I was the primary voice of the user during development and testing. I'm grateful to Waffle and team for the focus and consideration.

... and personal

• Alaska Statehood license plate photomosaic poster
• Royce's Alaskan License Plates
• Tips for working with inaccessible power receptacles (DIY StackExchange answer)
• A Brief Coda ... ... to Rhoda (Valerie Harper) and (Abe) Vigoda (and assonance thereof "Yoda", "soda", "pagoda", and "Toyota"). Yes, I realize that this is an entirely other demented kind of undue diligence. But I was chuckling the whole time, so it was worth it. :)

Other

• I have worked with FreeBSD for a while, mostly as an admin.
• I am disproportionately proud to have a credit in RFC 7914 (scrypt), of which I am a fan. My contribution was decidedly non-technical - but hey, I'll take it!
• A general Google stalker search may be informative.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially ... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out. - Jorge Luis Borges

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