Niels Provos

Forge Diaries: Episode 1 and Episode 3 all lightly touched on the Wolf’s Tooth Pattern.

This episode shows techniques for refining wrought iron to give it finer grain.

Did you ever wonder how swords were made?

A lot of people ask me about putting more emphasis on the “authentic” sounds that accompany working at the forge.

Here is Episode 2 of Forge Diaries.

Forge diaries are rough and unpolished videos that allow me to post more frequent updates of some of the work I do at the forge.

This Wootz Seax is the first knife we made from our crucible steel.

Wootz steel was known for its strength and durability and was produced in ancient India using a formerly lost process.

or How I failed to get the whole story I am lying on the bed with a stomach bug when the phone is ringing.

Our first experiments with creating crucible steel.

Here are some pictures of my recent forge rebuild.

While visiting Germany this year, I was on a quest to find Viking-age swords as a source of inspiration for future work.

The Serpent in the Sword project is slowly progressing.

Inspired by “The Serpent in the Sword” from Lee A Jones, I embarked on the quest of forging a pattern-welded double-edged sword that has a visual serpent at its core.

In my quest to forge another double-edged viking-age sword, I have been experimenting with a serpent pattern.

I am making a pattern-welded Viking-age double-edged sword.

The video shows forging a pattern-welded Viking-age sword consisting of a 5-bar construction based on dimensions from a find in Norway.

USENIX Security is by far my favorite conference.

This knife is a multi-bar construction with W1 for the cutting edge and 1095 and 15n20 for the twisted rods.

Last year, I started making an oak chest with forged straps and lock inspired by the Viking-age tool chest found at Mästermyr.

As my work on the Mästermyr-like chest is slowly coming to completion, I noticed that due to thicker planks, the chest is getting too heavy to carry comfortably without handles.

Malware infections such as SQL injection are a well known security problem.

Despite being incredibly busy at work, and purusing many extra curricular activities, I finally managed to update www.honeyd.org to phpBB3.

CNet’s Ellinor Mills wrote a nice security profile on me with the catching title: Google’s Niels Provos battles malware on the Web.

The HotSec 2011 CFP is out: http://www.usenix.org/events/hotsec11/cfp/ Important Dates Submissions due: May 5, 2011, 11:59 p.m.

Recently, I had the pleasure of flying from the new terminal at the San Jose Airport.

Metasploit has a great write up on new vulnerability in PDF.

Nick announced the release of Libevent-2.0.7-rc today.

PDF has become the de-facto standard for formatting print documents.

Heat treating a sword using a water quench is a tense affair as the sword my crack and many hours of work may be lost.

When examining a traditionally forged Japanese sword, the steel structure (hada) often looks like wood grain.

The is a knife made from a high carbon railroad spike.

Libevent 2.0.4-alpha is now available for download: http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-2.0.4-alpha.tar.gz http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-2.0.4-alpha.tar.gz.sig The complete change list is available here.

Although, I have made various attempts at forging knives, this tanto is the first knife I have completed.

Tom Pusateri reported success with using OpenSSL client certificates and libevent’s builtin OpenSSL support.

It has been a while since the last alpha release of libevent-2.0.

We just released a new stable version of Libevent that fixes the following problems:* If the kernel tells us that there are a negative number of bytes to read from a socket, do not believe it.

A while ago, I forged a San Mai billet with the hope to turn it into a tanto.

I just finished taking the 5-day basic forging class taught by Michael Bell at Dragonfly Forge.

The call for papers for the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET ‘10) Botnets, Spyware, Worms, and More just went out.

Google’s Anti-Malware team has prepared a moderator page where web masters and users can ask questions and vote which questions they would like to see answered.

Nick just announced two new libevent releases.

Yesterday, I managed to practice Aikido in Hamburg for the first time in almost twelve years.

The DirectShow vulnerabilities are being exploited all over the place now.

I had time to forge down the 2in pipe for the nozzle today which completed everything needed for the burner.

The landlord visited today while I was working on some bolt jaw tongs.

We recently published an article on web-based malware in ACM’s Queue Magazine.

Today, I learned how to make a monkey tool.