Tim Henkes Application 2023
About me
Hi!
I am Tim Henkes, known as "Syndace", a computer scientist masters and hobby mathematician. My passion is programming, and I am specializing in the topics of low-level hardware development and post-quantum cryptography. I currently work in a research project at Hochschule RheinMain, the university I graduated at. I run a little server with self-hosted open source alternatives to some proprietary mainstream services.
My connection to XMPP
Being quite unhappy about the state of mainstream messengers and the ongoing transformation to put everything into the cloud, XMPP caught my interest when a friend introduced me to it. In 2017 years ago I made the jump from just using XMPP to learning about it/joining and participating in the various MUCs and developing to improve it.
My long-term "mission" is to improve end-to-end encryption in XMPP. As part of this mission, I wrote an OMEMO library from scratch which currently powers the OMEMO implementations of Goffi's Libervia and Slixmpp/poezio. I have largely contributed to the recent versions of the OMEMO XEP, especially the cryptographic details. My next goals include writing a protoXEP for a master key approach to trust management, to simplify trust management across technologies like OMEMO or OX.
My experience over the last years in the XMPP community was very positive and I am optimistic that XMPP will continue it's current uptrend with all of the motivated members working on it.
I want to stay a part of that.
Contact me
Jabber ID: tim@mailbox.bz
E-Mail Address: syndace@web.de or me@syndace.dev
Why I am reapplying
I believe this year will be exciting for the end-to-entry encryption economy in XMPP. Adoption of the new OMEMO standard has finally begun, the first client with support is available and a number of clients are expected to follow this year. MLS brings a new interesting aspect to the table that I plan to look into. Add pubsub encryption/signing and the master key spec I plan to work on to the mix, and we have an amazing set of security and privacy tools in XMPP.
I am especially looking forward to the resumption of our in-person meet-ups this year.
Previous membership applications
https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tim_Henkes_Application_2019
https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tim_Henkes_Application_2020