Sven and the Art of Computer Maintenance

Sven and the Art of Computer Maintenance

About

This site

Sven and the Art of Computer Maintenance is the personal site of Sven Kiljan. Here I publish what interests me either professionally or personally.

This site can be accessed in several ways.

My work

The best way to describe my profession is as a blend of information science and information security.

Previously I worked at RedTeam Cyber Security. RedTeam is a company specialized in information security services for small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as providing security expertise for larger companies. Through RedTeam I worked for different clients such as Achmea (the largest insurance company in the Netherlands) and Tennet (the Dutch national electricity transmission system operator).

Before that I worked for CCV, a company that provides digital payment services for brick and mortar shops and webshops. These services support payments with credit cards (e.g. Mastercard, Visa, American Express), and both international and local online payment systems (e.g. PayPal, SEPA Credit Transfer, iDEAL, Bancontact).

And before all of that I was a PhD candidate at Open University of the Netherlands in the Kennisprogramma Veiligheid Digitaal Betalingsverkeer (Research Program on Safety and Security of Online Banking), a research program hosted by an academical partnership between NHL University of Applied Sciences and Politieacademie known as Lectoraat Cybersafety. My daily work was conducted at Radboud University in Nijmegen where I worked in the Digital Security research group of the Faculty of Science under supervision of my promoter, Marko van Eekelen.

My research consisted of exploring, expanding and evaluating usable security in online banking. For exploration, I examined 80 banks worldwide on which user authentication methods they employed for home and mobile banking, as well as on the applied communications security measures. A proposal was suggested by me to expand the existing options that banks have to authenticate transactions initiated by users, termed What You Enter Is What You Sign. This is a more secure and usable alternative to the well-known What You See Is What You Sign transaction authorization scheme. Also, I proposed two methods to compare and evaluate existing and new online banking authentication methods. My PhD thesis can be found here. I received my doctor’s degree in June 2017.

Contact information

This is a good starting point for those who do not know how to contact me through previously established channels.

Email

My e-mail address can be derived from: <first name>@<last name>.org

For those who do not have any experience reading syntaxes:

  1. Start by entering my first name.
  2. Add an @ sign to the end.
  3. Add my last name to the end.
  4. Finally, add a period and the letters o, r and g to the end (in that order).

My OpenPGP public key (download) is published with verified email on:

Key ID: 0x3AA8FAE0DEAE9D99

Fingerprint: E8D7 7D09 7A9C 640C E99F 1512 3AA8 FAE0 DEAE 9D99

Matrix

My Matrix ID can be derived from: @<first name>:<last name>.org

For those who do not have any experience reading syntaxes:

  1. Start by entering an @ sign.
  2. Add my first name to the end.
  3. Add a : sign to the end.
  4. Add my last name to the end.
  5. Finally, add a period and the letters o, r, and g to the end (in that order).

Some technical site information

This site uses static pages generated by Hugo. The layout is based on Ink by Kailash Nadh. The web server which offers this site to the Internet is nginx on Arch Linux.

Only first-party content is served through this site. Visitors are not tracked by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter or anyone else. There are no advertisements. There is no privacy policy since no data is collected, personal or otherwise. All that I kindly ask is that this site is not hammered down by (D)DoS attacks. Also, please do not attack my website in any other way. Be excellent.

Links on this site can redirect a browser to third-party sites when they are followed. Whatever they offer is something I cannot vouch for at anytime due to the dynamic nature of the Internet. I recommend uBlock Origin to protect one’s security, privacy and sanity when exploring the World Wide Web in the 21st century. uBlock Origin is available for Mozilla Firefox, Chromium and Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge.