Recent work
<<
Summary
I lead the Privacy and Webcompat Engineering team at Brave Software. We ship privacy features in the browser, conduct privacy reviews, work on advancing the state-of-the-art in adblocking while maintaining webcompat, and collaborate with the Research team to ship novel privacy interventions.
I've previously worked on DNS, encrypted DNS, consent tooling and telemetry.
I have an interest in privacy-respectful standards and am active in the IETF and W3C.
I care about social implications of technology, and was an Internet of Rights fellow at
ARTICLE 19, a UK-based human rights organization.
I am currently on the Advisory Council of
Open Tech Fund's Information Controls Fellowship.
I recently contributed an essay on how privacy technology and protocols are increasingly dependent on centralized infrastructure (and why that's a problem) in Meatspace Press's book
"Eaten by the Internet", which you can
buy here.
I blog at shivankaul.com/blog.
Engineering / Open Source
- Brave browser
- SugarCoat
- Autogenerate privacy-preserving JavaScript resource replacements.
- Popular on Hacker News,
Reddit and other places.
- XFR-over-TLS support for NSD
- Add support for RFC 9103 to the NSD auth server.
Research
- Co-chair, NDSS 2021 DNS Privacy Workshop.
- "Bringing Content Blocking To The Masses" - Talk given at
USENIX PEPR '22.
- "DNS Privacy Vs." - Panel at
USENIX PEPR '22.
- Artifact reviewer, PoPETS 2021.
Standards
- Working on Distributed Secret Sharing for Private Threshold Aggregation Reporting (STAR) at IETF.
- Co-chair, Key Transparency (KEYTRANS) at IETF.
- Co-chair, Oblivious HTTP Application Intermediation (OHAI) at IETF.
- RFC 9103: Encrypted DNS Zone Transfers
- Co-chair, Privacy Research Group at IETF/IRTF.
- Invited expert, W3C Privacy Interest Group.
Writing
- De-AMP - #1 on
Hacker News, and featured in
The Verge,
ZDNet,
Engadget.
- Normalization of privacy violations - #1 on
Hacker News.
Mentoring
- I've done various one-off mentoring for programs like
MITPOSSE and
IETF Guides.
- I do a lot of mentoring as part of leading my team.
Old Projects
- I created a Chrome extension that allowed users to pretty-print emails called PrettyPrintGmail.
- 10,000+ users.
- Used by at least one school district in New Jersey.
- No longer maintained.
- Ex-maintainer of and contributor to tough-cookie.
- RFC6265 Cookies and CookieJar for Node.js
- 30 million weekly downloads.