Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf)
termsecurityprogramming
The Polish researcher who wrote American Fuzzy Lop, the coverage-guided fuzzer that made automated bug-hunting genuinely effective, and the books Silence on the Wire and The Tangled Web on passive reconnaissance and browser security.
AFL changed the economics of finding memory-corruption bugs: instrument the target, mutate inputs, keep whatever reaches new code, and let a laptop discover crashes that skilled humans missed for years. Nearly every modern fuzzer descends from it, and large parts of open source were audited by it before anyone was paid to. His writing has the same quality as his tools - patient explanations of how information leaks from systems that look silent.
Also known as: lcamtuf, afl, american fuzzy lop, silence on the wire