Aaron Portnoy
Aaron Portnoy is Chief Product Officer at Mindgard and the inaugural Hacker Fellow at Dartmouth College, applying over twenty years of offensive research to AI security. He created the Pwn2Own hacking competition, organizing and judging its first six iterations while running research at TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative, and went on to co-found Exodus Intelligence, one of the first firms to commercialize zero-day research. Over his career he has personally discovered hundreds of zero-day vulnerabilities in software from vendors including OpenAI, Cursor, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Palo Alto Networks, and Adobe; authored the award-winning IDA Toolbag; and published research in Phrack. He has led offensive programs at Raytheon and Boldend and pioneered attack surface management research at Randori through its IBM acquisition. His current research focuses on the security of AI systems. Featured in TIME Magazine's 2014 cover story "World War Zero," Aaron has delivered over thirty invited talks at venues including Black Hat, REcon, CanSecWest, EkoParty, USENIX WOOT, BlueHat, RSA, and the NSA Distinguished Speaker Series.
Session
It’s not every day we convene a panel at Recon.
AI affects us all, but where can we go beyond buzzwords and make it concrete?
- What actually works, how we set up our own harnesses, what constantly fails, and what works today that didn’t even a month ago? Are there limits?
- How the technology affects us daily, from attackers to defenders? We see software development sped up to the max, models finding vulnerabilities autonomously, malware being dissected by AI, and written even faster.
- Topics such as disclosure, when vulnerability in code == public, and if coordinated disclosure can survive it. Is full disclosure back?
- And lastly… are we still going to have a job in a year or two? Will there still be a need for researchers? Let’s be specific.
We will welcome surprise guests to the panel, as we cycle through topics. The topics themselves are discussion seeds only.
