Hacking since the age of eight, Yan Shoshitaishvili is fascinated by understanding and commandeering the computation and actions carried out by binary code. He is currently pursuing his PhD in the Seclab at UC Santa Barbara and is one of the hacking aces behind team Shellphish. In the little spare time he has left, he develops and releases computer security tools on the Internet.

Yan and Fish are two members of Shellphish, a pretty badass hacking team famous for low SLA and getting the freaking exploit JUST A FREAKING MINUTE LATE. Their secret identities are those of PhD students in the security lab of UC Santa Barbara. When they're not CTFing or surfing, they're doing next-generation (what does that even mean?) security research. Their works have been published in numerous academic venues. For example, in 2013, they created an automatic tool, called MovieStealer, a tool to automatically break the DRM of streaming media services [1]. After taking 2014 to work on angr, in 2015, they followed this up with an analysis of backdoors in embedded devices [2].

Now, they've set their sights on helping the world analyze binaries faster, better, stronger, by revolutionizing the analysis tool landscape!

[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13/technical-sessions/paper/wang_ruoyu [2] http://www.internetsociety.org/doc/firmalice-automatic-detection-authentication-bypass-vulnerabilities-binary-firmware

Twitter: @zardus