Martin Ukrop is a Principal Research Software Engineer with Red Hat Research, focusing on security research and facilitating the industry–academia cooperation in EMEA. He received his PhD in Computer and Information Systems Security from Masaryk University, Czechia, focusing on human aspects in computer security. He remains an active teacher as well as a life-long learner.
His research looked into making security usable for IT professionals (developers, system administrators and such) that lack a specialized training in computer security. He focused on cryptographic interfaces (both programmable and command-line) of developer tools and software libraries. The emphasis of his work was placed on X.509-capable libraries, such as OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS, paying special attention to the process of certificate creation and validation.
Before coming to usable security he was interested in randomness testing and helped develop the EACirc project, the automatic problem solver based on circuit-like representation and genetic programming.