I've been tinkering with Apple hardware for most of my life. I taught myself to program on an Apple //e as a kid in the 80s, overclocked the 200 MHz G3 in a Blueberry clamshell iBook to 400 by moving a couple of surface mount passives in the 90s, worked on PowerPC Linux at Terra Soft in the early 2000s, and these days I take apart the XNU kernel on a MacBook Neo. Somewhere in there the tinkering turned into security, and I never really stopped.
Right now that's three threads:
- 🔬 Security research — memory-safety defects in the Apple-silicon (arm64e) XNU kernel and IOKit; active in the Apple Security Bounty program. I've been at this on and off since the late 90s, and I value reports a vendor can act on — reproduced on hardware, scoped honestly — over volume.
- 🛠️ Making — open-source FPV flight-controller firmware (AlienWhoop), a dozen merged PRs into Betaflight, and a rotating pile of Raspberry Pi / embedded / microcontroller projects.
- 📐 Mathematics — coding theory, lattices, and lattice-based (post-quantum) cryptography. A tool I enjoy more than a title I claim.
I published vulnerability research in the early 2000s, stepped away for a long career in IT, and circled back.
- CVE-2005-3533 — local root in OSH (Operator Shell); credited. Exploit-DB 1154 (also 788, 1300).
- Solaris 10 / CDE setuid local privilege escalation — Exploit-DB 1248.
- Sun Cobalt RaQ/Qube local root — Exploit-DB 21790.
- OpenSSL KEY_ARG remote overflow — ported to PowerPC (Yellow Dog Linux). Full Disclosure, Sep 2002.
- Null-avoiding PowerPC shellcode, credited in OS X Exploits and Defense (Syngress, 2008).
- Eight shellcodes catalogued as reference material in the CIA Shellcode Database (disclosed in WikiLeaks Vault 7, 2017).
- Founder, charter author, and owner of [0dd] (2002), a private invitation-only 0-day digest list.
- Canonical index of the early work: Packet Storm, author 1769.
After ~20 years in IT, I went back to university and completed my undergraduate degree:
- B.S. Mathematics & B.S. Computer Science (Cybersecurity), Fitchburg State University, 2026 — summa cum laude, 4.0.
- Antonucci Award (the university's highest honor for a graduating senior), Outstanding Mathematics Major, and student commencement speaker.
- Pi Mu Epsilon; member of AMS, ACM, IEEE, MAA.
- JMM 2026 poster, When Noise Protects and Destroys — where error-correcting codes meet lattice-based cryptography.
- Heading to an M.S. Applied Mathematics at WPI (2027).
Former U.S. Army Reserve officer (past Secret clearance), dad of two, in Massachusetts. Security is something I love — not the whole of who I am. There's usually a soldering iron or a drone, robot, or autonomous vehicle involved too.