Tao Yan (@Ga1ois) is a security researcher at Palo Alto Networks. He likes discovering new attack surfaces, exploring new research ideas (including but not limited to vulnerability discovery and exploitation ideas) and deep diving into system internals from both offensive and defensive perspectives. His interests include bug findings with dynamic fuzzing and static code analysis, exploits, mitigations bypass, sandbox escape and privilege escalation on various applications and OS components including browsers, Flash, RDP, COM/RPC, etc. He has also been involved with exploits, APTs, malware detection and defense. He has been listed as #7 researcher in 2016 and #4 researcher in 2017 for MSRC Top 100 Researchers. He is also the winner of the local escalation of privilege category in Pwn2own 2021 and the Chrome/MSEdge browser category in Pwn2Own 2024. In addition, he is a regular security patent inventor and security conference speaker including Black Hat, CanSecWest, BlueHat, VirusBulletin, Recon, POC, HITCON, etc.
