Hi there.

For the purpose of this introduction, my name is BeF, or least that's how people recognise me online most of the time.

I've been programming and hacking since personal computers came to be a thing some time in the 90s. It all started with bits and pieces in TurboPascal 5.0 on a 286 DOS machine, which connected to custom built circuits via parallel port. Over the years quite a bit of hardware and software hacking skills have been accumulated, some of which are owed to a formal higher education in computer science. After briefly developing backends for web applications in obscure languages such as Erlang, I have since been focussing on IT security aspects since 2009, where most of my time is spent analysing other people's creative source code, penetration testing and training interested parties on matters of secure software development.

Current efforts in open source development have been spent hardening already existing software such as major contributions to snuffleupagus, the PHP hardening extension. Other projects focus on checking and hardening configuration files, e.g.

• PCC - PHP Configuration Checker for Hardening PHP
• sshdcc - OpenSSH Configuration Checker
• ovpncc - OpenVPN Configuration Checker

Sponsorship would allow me to spend more time on mostly security related open source projects while hopefully making a lot of lives of software developers and IT professionals much easier.