Jem Berkes is a consultant and technology researcher. He focuses on cybersecurity, formal verification, and network technology. Jem has a background in Electrical and Computer Engineering (University of Waterloo) and has 25 years of experience in computer systems. As a Research Lead at Galois Inc, Jem led a team that designed cutting-edge technology to protect national infrastructure against attacks. While at Galois, Jem designed technology and provided advice to major tech companies and the US Government. Prior to that, Jem ran a start-up company which provided anti-spam and malware defense services to millions of customers worldwide. He has spoken at government conferences, BSidesPDX, M3AAWG, and IEEE events. Jem presents guest lectures at the University of Manitoba – Faculty of Engineering.
Education:
Embedded Systems: Security and Wireless (interference) topics, 2020
Advanced FPGA Topics, including timing and power optimization
Network Security presentation covering Wi-Fi security (802.11) and insecure communication channels. Invited lecture at University of Manitoba, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, February 2009.
[security] Analysis of Flame malware attack (Windows Update spoofing and MD5 collision)
[security] Berkes, J. Side-Channel Monitoring of Contactless Java Cards. MASc thesis, University of Waterloo, 2008.
[security] Berkes, J. Design of a DDoS Attack-Resistant Distributed Spam Blocklist. In Proceedings of 2nd IASTED International Conference on Communication and Computer Networks (CCN), Cambridge, MA, November 2004. [presentation]
[communications] Berkes, J., Schaub, D., Czyrnyj, T., and Olivier, J. Design of a Voice over IP System that Circumvents NAT. Technical report prepared for undergraduate design project, University of Manitoba, 2004.
[security] Internet spam and viruses; the missing link (November 2003)
Side-Channel Monitoring of Contactless Java Cards (completed 2008), thesis for Master of Applied Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. The thesis is based on lab work which examined side-channel attack techniques for contactless smart cards (RFID cards). Some of the card monitoring and measurement techniques developed are the first ever documented procedures of their kind, using only unmodified COTS hardware without requiring any custom or proprietary hardware/protocols.
renattach-1.2.2 (released 2004) is an efficient and highly effective Unix mail filter. It catches potentially dangerous attachments based on file extension, helping protect general users from malicious content in emails. Because it's not actually a virus scanner, there are no virus 'definitions' to maintain and there is very little processing overhead. The dangerous attachments can be renamed, deleted from the message, or the whole message can be killed/absorbed. The filter can run on Unix-like (including Linux, BSD) mail servers and is currently being used by several universities.
Design of a Voice over IP System that Circumvents NAT (completed 2004), by Berkes, Czyrnyj, Olivier, Schaub at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Manitoba. We were thrilled to receive IEEE's Ted Glass Award as well as IEEE's Group Design Project Award for 2003-2004.
JBMail 3.2 (released 2003) is a small but powerful win32 email client designed for portability and security. It's one of the very few Windows mail clients with full SSL/TLS functionality for both POP3 and SMTP. Other features include server-side mail storage, stripping of HTML down to plaintext, and advanced header-based junk filtering. JBMail is used worldwide and has the support of several Internet Service Providers.
Also see my site: PC-Tools.Net (launched 2000): freeware, trialware, and open-source software Jem has written over the years. All software is written in C, C++ or assembler and runs on DOS, Windows, or Unix-like (Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.)
