Hi, I'm Philipp 👋 — an IT systems-integration apprentice (Fachinformatiker - Systemintegration) at DATEV eG in Nürnberg, Germany 🇩🇪.

By day: cloud-native infrastructure, databases on Kubernetes, Linux & systems integration. By night: getting hardware that "isn't supported on Linux" to work anyway.

• 🐧 I like the seam between software and hardware — Linux internals, USB protocols, drivers, the kernel.
• 🤖 I build with AI in the loop — the work isn't the typing, it's understanding what the device actually wants and getting it running on real hardware.
• 🔍 In my experience, a lot of "doesn't work on Linux" hardware isn't unsupported — just unsolved (yet).
• 🎸 Off the keyboard: out in nature, in the water, on a run, or butchering a guitar solo.
• 🛟 Spent 12 years as a volunteer water rescuer & paramedic with the Bavarian Red Cross (BRK).

An AI-assisted reverse-engineering project. The EgisTec EH576 fingerprint sensor ships in a range of laptops but has no vendor Linux driver — so I drove the RE of its encrypted USB protocol (TLS-PSK, match-in-host) out of the Windows driver and got it working in libfprint: enrollment, verification, and PAM login / sudo / screen-unlock, with a one-command COPR install.

Every capture, gain calibration and suspend/resume cycle was validated on real hardware. The hard part was the debugging and the judgment calls — not the code.

C · reverse engineering · libfprint · USB · TLS-PSK · PAM · Ghidra · AI-assisted

• Docker — Docker Training Course for the Absolute Beginner · KodeKloud
• Kubernetes — Online Kubernetes Lab for Beginners, Hands-On · KodeKloud

Leveling up cloud-native (Docker / Kubernetes) alongside the apprenticeship — and hunting the next "why doesn't this work on Linux?" rabbit hole.