Charlie Miller

Overview

Charlie Miller earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 2000 and spent five years at the National Security Agency before becoming one of the world's best-known security researchers. In 2007, he became the first person to publicly demonstrate a remote attack on Apple's iPhone, showing how a flaw in the Safari browser could give an attacker control of the device. In 2008, he also publicly demonstrated the first remote attack on an Android phone. He has won the Pwn2Own hacking competition four times, where researchers compete to break into fully updated computers and phones, including the first exploit of a MacBook Air in 2008. In 2015, working with Chris Valasek, he remotely hacked a 2014 Jeep Cherokee and controlled its brakes, steering, and acceleration from a laptop, a demonstration that led Fiat Chrysler to recall 1.4 million vehicles. He has since worked on security at Twitter, Uber, and the self-driving car company Cruise, and he has co-written several books on hacking. 

Why He Matters

Charlie Miller's career shows what penetration testing is for. Every headline-making hack he performed proved a danger was real so it would be fixed, and the Jeep research forced the auto industry to take vehicle cybersecurity seriously. He also shows that the path into this work can run through pure mathematics and government service rather than a computer science degree. For young people, he reminds them that the most valuable hackers are the ones who find the flaw first and hand it to the people who can fix it.