Tim Henkes Application 2024

About me

Hi!

I am Tim Henkes, known as "Syndace", a computer scientist masters with general interest in maths, cryptography and hardware design. My passion is programming, and I am specializing in the topics of low-level hardware development, especially open-source ASIC design and tooling. I currently work in a research project at RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, 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 with the state of mainstream messengers and the ongoing transformation to move everything to the cloud, XMPP caught my interest when a friend introduced me to it. In 2017 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 MLS as well as 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 will be another good year for the end-to-entry encryption economy in XMPP. The first clients can communicate securely using omemo:1 with more clients to follow soon. Next to the usual OMEMO maintenance, I plan to work on MLS integration for XMPP, including a protoXEP, a prototype and potentially a full client implementation.

I am especially looking forward to our in-person meet-ups this year.