Junade Ali

Junade Ali

Hello! I'm Junade; I am a software engineering manager, author and computer scientist.


I have experience in a variety of areas; from road traffic engineering to financial services, web development to internet infrastructure. I have also done high-impact research work in computer security and Operations Research.


Over the past few years; I've written books, blog posts, scientific papers and given conference talks and interviews. This website archives various my blog posts, published works, recorded talks and press coverage of my work. On this home page you can find my biographical sketch and a selection of these works.

Biographical Sketch:

Junade Ali is a British computer scientist with specialist knowledge of computer security, distributed systems and software design. His software engineering experience has varied from being the lead developer of the then largest digital agency in the UK (by headcount) to developing software for embedded systems used in mission critical road safety applications.

At the age of 17, he started a post-graduate Masters, and was later awarded a Distinction and “Best Overall Masters” award for a thesis based of his earlier conference paper “Coverage and Sensor Placement for Vehicles on Predetermined Routes - A Greedy Heuristic Approach”. Junade currently holds Chartered Engineer regulatory status (the terminal qualification in engineering in the UK).

Junade designed the anonymity models that powers the Pwned Passwords service, leading to industry change in password security measures (by companies including 1Password, Okta, Apple, Google, LastPass, etc).

With specialist experience in refactoring legacy software and software design, Junade has published multiple books on software engineering, including the best-selling title: “Mastering PHP Design Patterns”.

Currently, Junade works as an Engineering Manager and is working part-time on a PhD in theoretical computer science.

Junade can be found on Twitter as @IcyApril.

Selected Works

NK PRO •

North Korean hackers breached sensitive defense network at Russian firm

DPRK-linked Lazarus Group accessed restricted data by using “highly interesting technique,” according to Kaspersky In a successful attack that shows how quickly North Korean hackers are able to evolve, the DPRK-linked Lazarus Group stole sensitive information from a Russian defense firm, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said on Thursday. According to the report, the hackers compromised a router in mid-2020 to create a bridge into a strictly separated network — a “highly interesting technique” that
HackerNoon •

North Korean Hackers Hide in Plain Sight | Hacker Noon

On the evening of the 25th January 2021, Google’s Threat Analysis Group published details of a campaign targeting security researchers attributed by them to “a government-backed entity based in North Korea”. Google described the attack as using a “novel social engineering method”. Social engineering usually describes attacks that target the human factors of computer security, such as by using phishing emails or phone call impersonation. Whilst highly-competent security experts may consider them
HackerNoon •

3 Software Ownership Models and Joint Care for Dev Teams | Hacker Noon

In traditional software operations, software would be "thrown over the fence" to operations teams. Technical operations teams would be aided in operating a service using Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). With the advent of practices like DevOps and the growth in hiring SREs (Site Reliability Engineers), development and operations are increasingly unified. This has allowed "chore" work like deployments and maintenance to be automated. Standard Operating Procedures still play a role in this w
The Institution of Engineering and Technology •

The IET - From apprentice to Chartered Engineer: at just 24

“As studying took a larger share of my time, I took a role working with embedded electronics for road traffic systems at a more traditional engineering firm,” he says. “About five years ago I was headhunted by an internet infrastructure and cybersecurity firm I had always wanted to work for.” Now an Engineering Manager, Junade leads an Operations Research team in charge of developing technologies in Artificial Intelligence and formally verified software to drive improvements in cybersecurity an
The Verge •

The Verge - Have I Been Pwned — which tells you if passwords were breached — is going open source

These days, we almost take it as a given that piss-poor security will inevitably expose some of your usernames and passwords to the world — that’s why 2FA is so important, and why you might want a password checkup tool like the ones now built into every modern browser (well, Safari is coming soon) so you can quickly replace the ones that were stolen. But nearly all of those password checkup tools owe something to Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned, which was kind of a novel idea when it first launch
The Cloudflare Blog •

Using data science and machine learning for improved customer support

In this blog post we’ll explore three tricks that can be used for data science that helped us solve real problems for our customer support group and our customers. Two for natural language processing in a customer support context and one for identifying attack Internet attack traffic. Through these examples, we hope to demonstrate how invaluable data processing tricks, visualisations and tools can be before putting data into a machine learning algorithm. By refining data prior to processing, we
The Cloudflare Blog •

Time-Based One-Time Passwords for Phone Support

As part of Cloudflare’s support offering, we provide phone support to Enterprise customers who are experiencing critical business issues. For account security, specific account settings and sensitive details are not discussed via phone. From today, we are providing Enterprise customers with the ability to configure phone authentication to allow for greater support to be offered over the phone without need to perform validation through support tickets. After providing your email address to a Cl
The Cloudflare Blog •

Project Crossbow: Lessons from Refactoring a Large-Scale Internal Tool

Cloudflare’s global network currently spans 200 cities in more than 90 countries. Engineers working in product, technical support and operations often need to be able to debug network issues from particular locations or individual servers. Crossbow is the internal tool for doing just this; allowing Cloudflare’s Technical Support Engineers to perform diagnostic activities from running commands (like traceroutes, cURL requests and DNS queries) to debugging product features and performance using b
The Cloudflare Blog •

Optimising Caching on Pwned Passwords (with Workers)

In February, Troy Hunt unveiled Pwned Passwords v2. Containing over half a billion real world leaked passwords, this database provides a vital tool for correcting the course of how the industry combats modern threats against password security. In supporting this project; I built a k-Anonymity model to add a layer of security to performed queries. This model allows for enhanced caching by mapping multiple leaked password hashes to a single hash prefix and additionally being performed in a determ
The Register •

The Register - Firefox hooks up with HaveIBeenPwned for account pwnage probe

Firefox has started testing an easier way for users to check whether they're using an online service that has been hacked, through integration with Troy Hunt's HaveIBeenPwned database. The hookup will work like this: part of a user's email address is hashed, and this hash is used to check if the address appears in HaveIBeenPwned's database of 5.1 billion email addresses linked to compromised internet accounts. The “Firefox Monitor” test will start with 250,000 users, mostly in the US, accordin
TechRepublic •

TechRepublic - Mozilla’s new Firefox service can tell users if they’re a victim of a data breach

Mozilla is integrating with the online tool Have I Been Pwned to alert users if they are at risk following website hacks. Mozilla is now offering the ability to check if Firefox users have been the victim of data breaches through the new Firefox Monitor service. The service uses the dataset of the popular website Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP), which collects and analyzes the database dumps disseminated in the darker corners of the internet. From this dataset, both users of HIBP and Mozilla's Firefo
Ars Technica •

Ars Technica - Find out if your password has been pwned—without sending it to a server

A new system that securely checks whether your passwords have been made public in known data breaches has been integrated into the widely used password manager, 1Password. This new tool lets customers find out if their passwords have been leaked without ever transmitting full credentials to a server. Security researcher Troy Hunt this week announced his new version of "Pwned Passwords," a search tool and list of more than 500 million passwords that have been leaked in data breaches. Users can a
The Cloudflare Blog •

Validating Leaked Passwords with k-Anonymity

Today, v2 of Pwned Passwords was released as part of the Have I Been Pwned service offered by Troy Hunt. Containing over half a billion real world leaked passwords, this database provides a vital tool for correcting the course of how the industry combats modern threats against password security. I have written about how we need to rethink password security and Pwned Passwords v2 in the following post: How Developers Got Password Security So Wrong. Instead, in this post I want to discuss one of
The Cloudflare Blog •

The Curious Case of Caching CSRF Tokens

It is now commonly accepted as fact that web performance is critical for business. Slower sites can affect conversion rates on e-commerce stores, they can affect your sign-up rate on your SaaS service and lower the readership of your content. In the run-up to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, e-commerce sites turned to services like Cloudflare to help optimise their performance and withstand the traffic spikes of the shopping season. In preparation, an e-commerce customer joined Cloudflare on the
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