Mike Walker

About

Mike Walker is a Senior Director at Microsoft Research building special projects:

• Project Freta – A prototype exploration of automated memory introspection: trusted sensing of threats to power the future of automated cloud defense.
• Fuzzing for Developers – An open source self-hosted developer fuzzing platform for Azure developed in partnership with many of Microsoft’s core product teams.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Mike led DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, a two-year $58M contest to construct & compete the first prototypes of reasoning cyberdefense AI. In 2016 at the DEF CON hacking contest, these prototypes took their first flight into the game of hackers, Capture the Flag, landing zero-day exploits and writing patches in a fully autonomous battle. Read about these AI prototypes in the New York Times (opens in new tab), Wired, and Popular Science (opens in new tab) or watch Mike on 60 Minutes (opens in new tab).

Mike has worked in a policy advisory role, testifying to the President’s Commission on Cybersecurity and serving as contributor and panelist to CNAS’s Surviving on a Diet of Poisoned Fruit. Prior to joining DARPA he worked as a research lab leader and principal vulnerability researcher focusing on tools to bring the power of supercompute automation to the field of software safety.

As a principal at the Intrepidus Group, Mike worked on Red Teams that tested America’s financial and energy infrastructure for security weaknesses. As part of the DARPA SAFER Red Team, Mike discovered flaws in prototype anonymity technologies.

Mike has played in and designed globally competitive hacking contests (“CTF”) and coached competitive hacking teams throughout his career.