Known as Shadowbrok3r, a handle chosen for a man of mystery and currently attached to a guy whose smart home tells him when the dog walks past the window.
I write Rust. Not "Rust for the API layer." Rust at every layer — from code that executes before your operating system has finished waking up, all the way to a WebAssembly frontend running in your browser tab, with firmware, desktop apps, mobile, and a couple of custom wire protocols stacked in between. If there's a rung on the abstraction ladder I haven't put Rust on, I haven't found it yet and I'm mildly annoyed about it.
My actual specialty is refusing to accept that a system is a black box. Locked-down device? Undocumented protocol? Proprietary cloud API that exists solely to make a $200 appliance dependent on a server in another state? I will packet-capture it, pull it apart, and reimplement it until it answers to my LAN instead. This has happened to a smart lock. It has happened to a pottery kiln. Nothing is safe. Not even the kiln.
- 🦀 Rust everywhere: UEFI/bare-metal, ESP32 firmware, native desktop, WASM/web, and a native iOS runtime — same language, same UI framework, wildly different silicon.
- 🔓 Reverse engineered a smart lock's RSA-1024 signing scheme straight out of HAR captures because I wanted my own door to talk to my own software.
- 🏺 Did the same to a kiln controller — DNS trace, JS bundle teardown, full Home Assistant integration. The kiln now reports to Grafana. The kiln did not consent.
- 🧠 Built a native iOS egui runtime with sandboxed WASM plugins and dual Cranelift/Pulley compilation, i.e. I wrote a JIT pipeline for an iPhone rather than open Xcode once.
- 🕸️ I write my own binary wire protocols. Yes, on top of MessagePack. Yes, I know. It's framed, it's compressed, it's mine.
- 🏠 Self-host the entire stack: Proxmox, K3s, OPNsense, Tailscale, Loki + Grafana — plus a T-Pot honeypot running LLM-powered decoys, because passive defense is boring and I'd rather read the transcripts.
- 🎛️ Tuned Corosync failover timing for a two-node HA cluster whose backhaul runs over the coax already in my walls. Enterprise high availability. Userbase: one. Worth it.
- 🤖 Deeply MCP-pilled — not "chatbot calls a function," but real tool access wired into CAD, circuit simulation, and production apps so an agent can actually go do the thing instead of describing it.
- 🔬 Comfortable on both sides of the fence: Wasmtime sandboxes and process injection, containment and escape. You can't build one credibly without understanding the other.
- 💍 Also a jewelry artist — lost-wax casting, silversmithing, and a home-built vacuum casting unit. Currently plotting acoustic microcrack detection, because a hobby that doesn't emit telemetry feels unfinished.
| The Thing | The Problem | What I Actually Did |
|---|---|---|
| Smart lock | Wouldn't talk to my house | Intercepted its traffic, extracted the signing scheme, built my own integration |
| Kiln controller | Cloud-locked, no API | DNS trace + JS teardown, shipped a full Home Assistant component |
| iOS | Wanted my Rust UI on it | Built a native egui runtime with a sandboxed WASM plugin system and its own JIT |
| Two-node cluster | Split-brain over consumer coax | Hand-tuned Corosync token timing until failover stopped lying to me |
| Attackers | Kept knocking | Gave them a whole fake building with AI-powered staff, then read the logs |
| A Game Boy | Existed | Wrote an emulator for it. On Android. With a Bluetooth controller. |
| Silver jewelry | Might have invisible cracks | Currently designing an acoustic sensor rig, because of course I am |
No layer gets to keep secrets from me. That's genuinely the whole thing. It's why I use an immediate-mode GUI where the interface is a pure function of visible state instead of a retained widget tree quietly desyncing behind my back. It's why I self-host instead of renting opacity by the month. It's why I'd rather spend a weekend inside a protocol than an hour reading marketing copy about it.
Everything else — the firmware, the honeypots, the CAD bridges, the kiln — is just that one principle wearing different hats.
Happy to talk Rust, reverse engineering, homelab architecture, agent tooling, or why your smart device is probably phoning home more than you think.
Currently accepting bets on which household appliance falls next.