Talha Bin Tariq

Disclaimer: This is my personal blog. Any views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer(s).

 I am a Senior Consultant in the Threat and Vulnerability Management Team at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Before joining PwC, I was a  Software Engineer in the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research, working on High Assurance Trusted Computing, Virtualization Security and Cloud Computing Futures.

Before joining Microsoft, I was a security researcher in the Information Security Group at the Royal Holloway University of London where I did my Masters in Mathematics (Cryptography). My adviser was Professor Chris J. Mitchell.

During my time in the UK I worked at Sun Microsystems as a Technical Consultant working on SunSPOTs, JavaCards and their applications.

Even before, I was working with NCR Corporation as a Software Design Engineer and ebanking Technical Consultant in the Financial Solutions Division working on PCI, ATMs, POS Terminals, Electronic Cheque processing systems.

I did my Bachelors in Computer Science from National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST-NU) Pakistan.

My interests include:

• Reverse Engineering, malware, Exploit Development and Honeynets.
• Operating Systems, Virtualization and Trusted Platforms.
• Smartcards, financial security and EMV.
• Mobile Security, NFC and RFID.
• Privacy, anonymity and traffic analysis.

In my free time I am either practicing Jiu-Jitsu or doing some photography.

Selected Publications and patents:

US Patent pending: Key Management using Trusted Platform Modules

· Towards a Programmable TPM; Talha Tariq & Paul England, in Trust 2009 Second International Conference on Trusted Computing, Oxford, UK.

· Extending Secure Execution Environments; Talha Tariq, [RHUL-MA-2009-9] Technical Report, Department of Mathematics, University of London.