Mike Stay Email & Phone Number

I'm a technical problem solver.My undergraduate degree is in physics, and my graduate theses are on topics in mathematical physics approached from a computer science perspective. My PhD thesis examined several places where the structures arising in mathematical physics also appeared in computer science, ranging from algorithmic information theoretic analogues of thermodynamics and the uncertainty principle to compact closed bicategories.My first job after my undergrad education was doing reverse-engineering and cryptanalysis; I came up with a practical ciphertext-only attack on Zip encryption and was a coauthor on the best attack on AES until 2009. I worked on software security at Google for six years; I was part of the team that developed the security API that JavaScript adopted in ECMAScript 5.As CTO of Pyrofex, I hired and managed a 12-person team of developers for a cryptocurrency project. With two other researchers, I developed the Casanova consensus algorithm, which was the basis of a different prototype cryptocurrency that demonstrated 57k TPS. (That's individual transactions, not bundled in any way!) I improved my Zip attack to recover a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin and got featured in Wired.My profile banner is an application of the Droste Effect to an OTCA metapixel, an implementation of Conway's Game of Life in itself. When you go 180 degrees clockwise around the limit point, you go one level deeper into the picture.If there's a hard technical problem to solve, I have the skills and experience to pull it off. I'm principally looking for consulting work, but feel free to reach out with anything you think might be interesting.