Giovanni Vigna

Vigna co-runs the security lab at UC Santa Barbara with Christopher Kruegel and is behind Shellphish, one of the longest-lived teams in capture-the-flag hacking contests. The team won the DEF CON CTF in 2005 and has served ever since as a farm system for PhD students.

When DARPA pitted machines against each other in the 2016 Cyber Grand Challenge — find, exploit and patch vulnerabilities with no humans involved — Shellphish's Mechanical Phish took third place. The tooling was released as open source, and the angr binary analysis framework is now widely used for automated exploit discovery. In 2011 Vigna and Kruegel founded the malware analysis company Lastline, which VMware bought in 2020.