Cryptography people actually use
Getting the primitives right is table stakes. Most cryptography fails at adoption instead, because the interface asks too much of whoever has to use it.
Shibly Meeran
I am Director of Platform Engineering at Amagi, where my team owns the shared identity, infrastructure and AI layer that every internal product runs on. Before this I ran security engineering there.
Most of what I build is plumbing. Xipher encrypts without a server to call home. SLV keeps secrets in the repository, beside the code they belong to. The access work at Amagi hands out short-lived tokens instead of credentials that sit around waiting to leak. The useful parts end up on GitHub.
That button encrypts in your browser against a public key this domain publishes at
/.well-known/xipher, so nothing you type reaches a server on the way to me.
What I actually do
Getting the primitives right is table stakes. Most cryptography fails at adoption instead, because the interface asks too much of whoever has to use it.
A credential that was never issued cannot leak. That is most of the reason my access work leans on short-lived tokens rather than better storage for long-lived ones.
Findings belong in the pipeline and the issue tracker. A separate security backlog is a backlog engineers learn to ignore.
Internal tools compete with "I'll just do it myself," and they lose that comparison more often than platform teams admit. So the test I use is whether the platform is the easier path.
Proof of work
The two public ones are MIT-licensed and running in places I will never hear about, which is the outcome I was hoping for.
Your password is the private key, so there is no key file to lose.
Argon2id turns a passphrase into a keypair, which also means there is no server in the middle to trust. Hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-1024 for post-quantum cover, XChaCha20-Poly1305 for the payload. Ships as a CLI, a Go library, WASM, a browser app and a GitHub Action.
Secrets you can git commit on purpose.
Secure Local Vault keeps encrypted secrets beside the code they belong to, with no secret store to run. Envelope encryption and key-wrapping for team sharing, ephemeral injection into CI, Kubernetes-native, pluggable AWS / Azure / GCP KMS backends. Presented at Black Hat Arsenal twice.
Recently
Internal platform and security work, described at the level of what each piece does and why.
2023 – 2024 · Security Engineering
Container image scanning gated before deployment across production Kubernetes, rather than reported after it. SAST adopted across five product lines, with findings synced into the normal issue tracker, so vulnerabilities joined ordinary engineering work instead of a separate security backlog nobody grooms. Secret scanning in the build, plus fixes to the validation framework to kill the false positives that teach people to ignore alerts. A distroless image initiative to shrink what's in production in the first place.
Also wrote the security function's annual operating plan and the quarterly roadmap cadence the team then ran on for three years. That part was unglamorous, and it is the reason any of the rest of it shipped.
Architect → Senior Engineering Manager
Architected a company-wide Zero Trust access gateway that retired scattered SSH keys, per-cluster access requests and client-side credential config: SSH brokered with nothing configured on the client, Kubernetes access via OIDC, SSO for internal users.
Wrote the org's policy restricting long-lived IAM credentials to a narrow approved set, with enforcement and an exception path that people could actually use. Established quarterly privileged-access reviews. Built the security metrics dashboard leadership reports from, and ran the cloud risk register through to closure.
SLV came out of this work, was adopted across the company, and is recognized well beyond the team that built it.
Now · Platform Engineering
Defined the charter, structure and operating plan for a new central function: ~10 engineers across cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, identity, cost, observability, API gateway and AI infrastructure. Originated and specified roughly twenty platform initiatives. I wrote each design, then handed delivery to an owning engineer and kept the outcome.
A centralized identity token exchange service, so internal services stopped each writing their own token validation. KMS-backed signing key, mutual-TLS gateway, audience validation at both the provider and the target, short-lived tokens scoped per target, and a named-rule, block-by-default policy engine. Extended with a GitOps group-identity layer: membership as version-controlled YAML, owner approval enforced in the pipeline, resolved to token claims at deploy time.
Alongside it: a scoped token broker issuing short-lived repo-scoped credentials in place of long-lived personal access tokens; self-service Kubernetes access and certificate lifecycle management; a self-service developer portal replacing manual ticketing for access, certificates, on-call and approvals; CI consolidated onto one autoscaling system, extended to GPU runners; a managed → self-hosted API gateway migration across dev, pre-production and production; and per-team monitoring stacks folded into one governed observability platform, with monitoring-of-monitoring and 90 days of undownsampled retention.
Founded and led the cloud cost optimization program across a large multi-cloud estate, reaching six figures of verified savings in a single month and reporting to executives monthly. Underneath it sits a multi-cloud cost dashboard with forward run-rate, storage tiering automation, reservation automation, idle detection with owner-approved auto-stop, and per-workload Kubernetes cost attribution.
The function now owns unified AI infrastructure: one internal API fronting dedicated hardware, managed cloud models and direct providers, so consumers never change endpoints while cheap capacity carries baseline load and the cloud absorbs surges. Per-team budgets, quota enforcement and spend attribution sit on top of it.
A GitOps maturity assessment and whitepaper, surveying every product line against a target standard and naming the gaps blocking rollout. The other is "The 10 Commandments of Engineering," the principles document the wider org is held to. Ten of them, covering everything from designing before building to reviewing code properly.
Offence, in service of defence
Everything here was authorized, reported and fixed. It is on the page because the fix is the interesting part.
Talks & writing
On SLV, and on how secrets leak from a developer machine through to deployment. Isolated encrypted vaults close that path.
Written for IABM, making the case at length for keeping secrets beside the code they belong to.
SLV's first outing, presented with Sriram Krishnan.
The long version
Architect, Security Engineering → Senior Engineering Manager, Security Engineering → Director of Platform Engineering
I joined to build security tooling that engineers wouldn't route around, and ended up owning the platform the whole company builds on.
Security Engineering
Application security at the scale where a cricket match is a load test.
Architect, Information Security
Six years building the DevSecOps toolchain: scanning, triage automation and the unglamorous integrations that decide whether a security programme is real.
Security consulting & tooling
Security assessments alongside a fair number of side projects, which is where most of my older open-source libraries come from.
Kindle
Automation frameworks and test suites for the Kindle software stack.
System Engineer
Network operations: monitoring, support, and automating my way out of the parts that repeated.
Before all of it: B.E. Computer Science & Engineering, Coimbatore Institute of Technology, 2007–2011.
LinkedIn reaches me for the ordinary kind of message. For the other kind, this domain publishes a Xipher public key. Encrypt in your browser, or from a terminal:
$ xipher encrypt text --fetch -k shib.me