May, 18 2016 — SatoshiLabs is thrilled to announce that Dr. Jochen Hoenicke aka johoe has joined the company as TREZOR Cryptographer. Dr. Hoenicke comes with a wealth of expertise within software development and cryptography.

Johoe returning the first part of Bitcoins.

The white hat hacker has received praise and admiration from the Bitcoin community for sweeping and returning over 800 bitcoins from addresses generated with a security error on Blockchain.info’s webwallet, in order to refund users who lost their bitcoins.

Thanks to the opensource nature of TREZOR and Johoe’s genuine interest in Bitcoin security, he also has reported and patched a vulnerability in TREZOR known as the side-channel attack.

Hoenicke is joining the TREZOR R&D team to develop new cryptography functionalities for TREZOR 2.0 and to conduct security reviews of the code.

Dr. Jochen Hoenicke’s Bio

After acquiring his Masters and Doctorate in Computer Science at the University of Oldenburg, Jochen joined the Software Engineering Faculty of University of Freiburg as Research Group Leader where he focused on the fields of program verification, invariant generation for sequential and concurrent programs, interpolation in SMT.

Hoenicke has produced numerous academic and research papers and software developments. He is the lead developer of the SMT solver

SMTInterpol which is a major component of the program analysis framework Ultimate. These tools are based on several innovations, e.g., proof tree preserving interpolation [1] and trace abstractions [2].

Jochen joined our team for TREZOR 2.0 Hackaton in Southern Bohemia’s woods.

SatoshiLabs’ Expertise

TREZOR has since its launch become the benchmark of quality for Bitcoin security and an example to follow for other hardware wallets.

Alena Vranova, CEO of SatoshiLabs speaks of the importance of the TREZOR R&D team: “We have some of the most excellent brains in the Bitcoin world. All SatoshiLabs’ developers have a superb understanding of Bitcoin and a great excitement for what we do.”

SatoshiLabs’ R&D is lead by two well-known Bitcoin innovators — Marek Palatinus aka Slush and Pavol Rusnak aka stick. Slush is the inventor of the bitcoin mining pool and operator of the Slush Pool since 2010. Pavol is all-around hacker, a highly regarded security expert and privacy activist. Together, Slush and Stick have invented TREZOR, the first and most secure hardware wallet.

Pavol, TREZOR Core Developer is excited to work with Johoe: “He is a great mind with a profound expertise in cryptography. It is very inspiring to see Johoe developing new features for TREZOR. His involvement will propel us faster to achieving our goal: to bring top security to the hands of Bitcoin and digital assets owners worldwide.”