Hi! My Name is Nils Kopal.
I am a professor for Applied Computer Science, a cryptography and IT security expert and crypto maniac, astro photographer, retro computer tinkerer, and hobby YouTuber :-). You are here on my private blog, where I mainly blog about historical, classical, and modern cryptography. I built this blog as an addition to my YouTube channel “Cryptography for everybody” (see below).
I hope you enjoy your stay on my blog,
Nils
In the following, you learn a little more about my current activities:
Hochschule Niederrhein and the Cyber Campus NRW
I am a professor for Applied Computer Science and work for the Hochschule Niederrhein (University for Applied Sciences) and the Cyber Campus NRW. At the campus, we educate students (bachelor’s/master’s) in cyber security & privacy, cyber security management, and digital forensics.
The Decrypt Project
I worked for the DECRYPT research project. In this international and interdisciplinary project, we researched historical cryptology in all of its aspects. Feel free to have a look at our project page: http://www.de-crypt.org. In the project, I was responsible for cryptanalysis.
My Research
For my scientific publications have a look at this page.
You can also find me on research gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nils-Kopal.
CrypTool 2
I am the project leader of CrypTool 2 (CT2). CT2 is an open-source e-learning software for cryptology (cryptography and cryptanalysis) and freely available. I develop new components for CT2, but also supervise bachelor and master projects at different universities (e.g. Niederrhein, Siegen, Mannheim, Bochum, Munich, and others) developing and researching for the CrypTool project. Visit our CrypTool project webpage: https://www.cryptool.org.
CryptoBooks – Our Bibliography of Crypto Books
Another topic I am involved in is our web project “cryptobooks”, a bibliography of historical books about cryptography. Together with Tobias Schrödel (visit his website https://www.sichere.it) I created https://www.cryptobooks.org. Tobias and I are both (crazy!) collectors of such historic cryptography books and Tobias already created long ago an online database about such books. Together, we now created and maintain our online bibliography.
My Cryptography YouTube Channel
Some years ago, I started my YouTube channel about cryptology “Cryptography for everybody”, named after the CrypTool project’s motto. In my videos, I mainly use CrypTool softwares for the demonstration of cryptology. Visit my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrypTool2/.
Astro Photography
I’ve also been an amateur astrophotographer since late 2022 (see https://www.astrobin.com/users/NilsAstro/). This one is the best image, one of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), I’ve taken so far with my 750mm Newton telescope:
Here is another nice image I took. It is M42, the Great Orion Nebula (and you can see M43, the Running Man Nebula above it). It is a total of 1 hour and 20 minutes of RGB data capture with my 500mm APO telescope:
My Retro Computing YouTube Channel
Also, I am a retro computing guy. I tinker with old computers (especially Commodore computers), solder, play games, and program (e.g. 6502 asm). I also uploaded sdome videos about that hobby to a second YouTube channel — but currently I don’t plan to further upload new videos. I just don’t have the time to do so :-(. But feel free to visit the other channel and watch the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/NilsRetroHobbyRoom.
Me on GitHub & Discord
You will find many crypto-related (and other) softare projects I created on GitHub: https://github.com/n1k0m0
Finally, If you want to chat and hang digitally hang out together, you should join the “Cryptography for everybody” Discord server: https://discord.gg/8JeTZd8EpT