Dave Aitel
More info
- Founded
- Immunity Inc. (2002)
- Known for
- CANVAS, SPIKE, the Dailydave mailing list
The former NSA computer scientist who turned exploits into shelf-ware with a support contract.
Aitel worked as a computer scientist at the NSA and then at @stake before founding Immunity in Miami in 2002. The same year he released SPIKE, one of the first framework-based fuzzers for network protocols, which showed you could describe a protocol's structure once and let the machine find the bugs.
Immunity's flagship, CANVAS, was a commercial exploitation framework for penetration testers, competing with Core Impact and later with H. D. Moore's free Metasploit. Immunity also sold exploits for freshly found vulnerabilities to subscribers. The Dailydave mailing list became one of the field's more outspoken forums, and Aitel a loud voice for the view that offensive skill is a prerequisite for defence.