Dr. Fabian Yamaguchi

Dr. Fabian Yamaguchi is co-founder and CTO of the IT security consultancy Whirly Labs (Pty) Ltd, Associate Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University, and Chief Scientist Emeritus at Qwiet.ai (formerly ShiftLeft Inc.). He has over 15 years of experience in cyber security, both as an individual contributor and in leadership roles. Most recently, he was a founding team member of ShiftLeft Inc where he built and lead the R&D team that designed and implemented the technology for automated vulnerability discovery at the heart of the product offering - based on his 2015 award-winning PhD thesis "Pattern-Based Vulnerability Discovery".

Throughout his career, he has identified previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely used software such as Microsoft Windows and Linux kernels, the Squid proxy server, and the VLC media player. He has presented his findings and techniques at both major industry conferences such as BlackHat USA, DefCon, First, and CCC, and renowned academic security conferences such as ACSAC, IEEE Security and Privacy, and CCS.

He is the inventor of the code property graph and lead developer of the open-source code analysis platform Joern. Fabian holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Goettingen and a master’s degree in computer engineering from Technical University Berlin.