Meredith L. Patterson

Timeline

1. 1990–1999

   Houston and a Mars simulation

   She lives in and around Houston for 24 years, attends Kingwood High School from 1990 to 1994, and studies linguistics at the University of Houston. She supports herself as a website designer, technical writer, math teacher and Houston Press restaurant critic. In 1999, she travels above the Arctic Circle as a NASA correspondent for a Mars simulation mission.

2. 2005

   Parse trees against SQL injection

   After moving to Iowa City for a master's in linguistics and a PhD in computer science at the University of Iowa, she presents the first parse-tree validation technique for stopping SQL injection attacks at Black Hat in Las Vegas in 2005. This work with Robert J. Hansen introduces language-theoretic security, or LangSec, an approach to software security focused on input handling, complexity and program design.

3. 2006

   Data mining inside PostgreSQL

   She builds her support vector machine data-mining library into PostgreSQL as a query-by-example extension to SQL and presents it at CodeCon in 2006. Google's Summer of Code funds the early work, which becomes the basis of her startup Osogato, built to make playlists from users' own music collections. Before founding Osogato, she works for Mu Security.

4. 2008–2009

   A home lab for glowing yogurt

   In spring 2008, she coauthors the USENIX workshop paper Freezing More Than Bits with David Chaum and Len Sassaman, criticizing the scant attention to user privacy in the One Laptop per Child XO. In 2009, she runs a makeshift biology lab in her San Francisco dining room. With a $40 ultrasonic jewelry cleaner and genes for a green-glowing protein, she makes yogurt bacteria light up and aims for a strain that glows in the presence of melamine.

5. 2009–2010

   Certificate attacks with Dan Kaminsky

   At Black Hat in 2009, Dan Kaminsky presents joint work with Patterson and Sassaman on pervasive flaws in the Internet's certificate authority infrastructure, showing that web browsers can be fooled into accepting fraudulent X.509 certificates. In August 2010, she and Sassaman present Exploiting the Forest with Trees at Black Hat USA.

6. 2011

   The Science of Insecurity

   In March 2011, she and Len Sassaman give an invited lecture at Dartmouth College titled Towards a formal theory of computer insecurity: a language-theoretic approach. At the 28th Chaos Communication Congress in 2011, she presents The Science of Insecurity, developed with Sergey Bratus, arguing that software is insecure when it gives users powerful computational facilities right at the interface.

7. 2012–2018

   Hammer and Upstanding Hackers

   In 2012, she is a software engineer at Red Lambda living in Brussels and speaks at TROOPERS on the theory of insecurity. By 2014, she is affiliated with Nuance Communications and her own firm, Upstanding Hackers, which develops the open-source Hammer parser generator library. In October 2018, she co-chairs the IEEE Workshop on Language-Theoretic Security and speaks in Dartmouth's Women in Cybersecurity series.

8. As of October 2026

   Special Circumstances and LangSec

   By 2022, she is affiliated with Special Circumstances and sits on the organizing committee of the Eighth LangSec Workshop at IEEE Security & Privacy. She holds the same role for the Twelfth LangSec Workshop in May 2026, where she also serves on the program committee.