Alex Chernyakhovsky

Hi!

I'm Alex Chernyakhovsky, a software engineer at Google. I recently graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, more commonly called Course 6.

I enjoy tinkering with distributed systems, from massively parallel, distributed simulations to high-availability web services and everything in between. I look at systems with both reliability and security in mind; I helped break MIT's Kerberos 5 deployment in 2012 and designed the initial patches that allowed OpenAFS to use cryptography stronger than DES (CVE-2013-4134) while requiring no client-side changes.

Having used Linux since 1998, I'm a firm believer in open source. I am currently a Debian Developer, Fedora Packager, and have contributed patches to various open source projects, most recently to iPXE, improving SSL support.

While at MIT, I joined the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB). My main responsibilities included maintaining the free web-hosting service Scripts, the XVM virtual machine service, and the popular Linux remote-access server Linerva. I also worked on the dorm management system Dormbase and contributed to various other SIPB projects. In January 2014, I co-taught the alumni-run “Caffeinated 6.828,” which compressed MIT's semester-long, graduate-level operating systems course into 4 short weeks.

I researched the spread of avian influenza, developing a novel predictive methodology for vaccine strain selection. This research has resulted in numerous publications and an invited talk at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA.

Contact

Email to alex@achernya.com is the easiest way to reach me. I also maintain a PGP key, BBC7 56DD BE59 5F6B, which is available from the key servers. Encrypted email may take me a bit longer to respond to, as the PGP private key is stored on a limited subset of my computers. I'm also @achernya on Twitter and achernya on IRC.

Photography

I enjoy taking photographs, usually landscapes and macro shots. Here are some of my latest photos.