About Christopher Kunz

Hi, this is my home page. I, that is Christopher Kunz, born in ‘79 and living in Hanover, Germany. I studied (CompSci Major) and now work there.

I finished studying in 2007 (a bit late, but still in an OK amount of time) and since then, I’ve been working as a research fellow at the Institute for Networks and Distributed Systems which is a part of the Regional Computing Center for Lower Saxony.

In 1997, I founded my first company, which I first ran alone and later shared with two partners, Jens Rehpoehler and Sebastian Grewing. Together, we founded Filoo GmbH. Our core competence is Hosting, Housing, Colocation and Game Servers which we started to offer in one, now two different data centers in Frankfurt, Germany.

Since the late nineties, I have been trying to program without a lot of success - first in Perl (which I don’t like), later in PHP (which doesn’t like me). Still, in some kind of tragic unanswered love, I stuck to PHP and acquired a decent set of basic skills.
My interest in security in general as well as web application security in particular led to a publishing house approaching me for a book in 2005. The work - aptly called PHP-Sicherheit (“PHP Security”). The book, written with one, later two co-authors, has turned into a standard work for web application security and is currently published in the third edition with a fourth edition planned. Reactions by reviewers and readers have been very positive.

Apart from my book, I have published a solid amount of articles on different topics for german and international magazines - c’t, iX, PHP magazine, to name a few.

In my free time, I rarely do sports - my only weekly exercise is medieval sword fighting which I do very enthusiastically (as well as the historical reenactment that comes with it). That sport makes me not inflate myself and caters for a nice amount of bruises and concussions during the weekends.

I used to get those bruises and concussions in the first row at metal concerts, but lately, I have not been to many. I still like Death, Black and Viking Metal, with bands like Moonsorrow, Amon Amarth und Ensiferum in my iPod or CD player.

Which is a PS3, by the way. After overcoming my WoW addiction, frustration on the PC gaming market grew: Graphics adapters are always expensive, there’s always a new CPU to go with the GPU and subsequently, I decided to switch to a next-gen console.

That’s it, more or less. Boring, innit?