Meredith L. Patterson

Meredith L. Patterson is an American technologist, science fiction writer and journalist, born on April 30, 1977, who is also a blogger and software developer and a leading figure in the biopunk movement. Raised in Houston, she earned a master's degree in linguistics and a doctorate in computer science at the University of Iowa. Her computer science work applies computational linguistics to computer security: in 2005 she presented the first parse tree validation technique for stopping SQL injection attacks at the Black Hat conference, and she integrated a support vector machine data mining library into PostgreSQL, which became the basis of her startup Osogato. She contributed to open source database projects and, with Dan Kaminsky and her husband Len Sassaman, co-presented 2009 research on flaws in the certificate authority infrastructure that let browsers accept fraudulent X.509 certificates.