Jacob Marks

Update, May 2026: After completing a deeper review of the CyberChef Payments work, I split the project into a small ecosystem. The CyberChef fork remains the implementation/runtime layer, while CyberChef-Payments is now the workflow library and discovery surface. —— I built a set of payment cryptography extensions for CyberChef using Codex. The fork is at github.com/J8k3/CyberChef and there's a hosted instance running at cyberchef.jacobmarks.com . CyberChef is a browser-based data transformation and analysis tool from GCHQ . It's useful for a wide range of encoding, crypto, and parsing tasks, and the recipe model, where you chain operations together and run them in sequence, makes it well-suited for the kind of multi-step payment cryptography work that's otherwise done across several disconnected tools or scripts. In particular CyberChef is entierly browser based and you can freely download and run it locally making is a great tool for testing and prototyping without s...

AWS announced Multi-Region Keys in AWS Payment Cryptography. You can read the official post here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/multi-region-keys-a-new-approach-to-key-replication-in-aws-payment-cryptography/ This was a meaningful launch because it crossed one of the boundaries AWS takes very seriously: Region isolation. Replicating payment cryptographic keys across Regions meant moving highly sensitive customer material across a boundary that is normally treated as a hard line. That required a lot of design review, security scrutiny, and approvals. Moving critical customer data across Regions is not something anyone treats casually. One of my engineers handled much of the implementation while I drove execution, launch readiness, and stakeholder alignment. Because the launch was time-sensitive, I had to stay deeply involved in approvals, resolving concerns, and making sure decisions were happening fast enough to keep the work moving. A lot of the real work was not writing c...

AWS announced the launch of AWS Payment Cryptography this week, and I’ve had the opportunity to lead the service from its earliest definition through production launch. The official AWS announcement is here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/06/aws-payment-cryptography/ . This was one of those projects where the hard part was never just building software. The challenge was defining a service that could meet the expectations of payment processors, issuers, and financial institutions who were used to a vastly different interaction model while operating inside the security, compliance, and operational standards required for payment cryptography. My role started at the beginning: taking early customer input, writing the initial business requirements, and helping shape the architecture that would eventually become the service. That meant defining the threat model, establishing the security posture, and making early decisions around control-plane boundaries, data-plane design, ...