Dan Guido.

About me

I co-founded Trail of Bits in 2012. We audit software and build tools to find security bugs. In 2020 we audited Zoom while the world's meetings moved onto it. That same year we audited Voatz, the mobile voting app, and found ways to alter or cancel votes. West Virginia dropped it from elections. In 2025 we placed second in DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge and took home $3M.

I created iVerify. We released its iPhone app in 2019 to check for signs of device compromise and spun out the company in 2023. I also made Algo, an open-source VPN server, after deciding most people don't need a commercial one. The New York Times and Consumer Reports both recommended it.

At NYU Tandon, I spent four years as the first Hacker in Residence and taught the cybersecurity capstone course for seven. I helped start the OSIRIS Lab. Trail of Bits and I trained cadets at the US military service academies to hack, then turned that material into the public CTF Field Guide.

I sometimes say things in public that get people upset. In 2016 I argued Apple could comply with the FBI's court order to build custom firmware that would unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone. I called the firmware "FBiOS," and the media picked up the term. In 2019 I got myself escorted out of Black Hat for making too much noise about a sponsored talk on a novel encryption scheme. The conference pulled the talk from its website a week later.

I grew up on Long Island. As a teenager I figured out I could change anyone's grades at my high school. I showed the superintendent. He thanked me, then banned me from the school's computers for most of junior and senior year.

I went to NYU Tandon (then Polytechnic), where I was selected for the federal CyberCorps Scholarship for Service. It paid tuition in exchange for government cybersecurity work, which I did as an NSA intern, first in TAO on the offensive side and then in IAD on the defensive side. TAO is the work that shaped how I think about security. My first job out of school was at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and after that I joined iSEC Partners, the security consultancy a generation of notable researchers came up through. CISA put me in the Scholarship for Service Hall of Fame in 2021.

Around eighty people into Trail of Bits, I started feeling out of my depth and went back to school. I'm finishing Harvard Business School's Owner/President Management program in October 2026. Along the way I've ended up lecturing two HBS classes myself, one on AI and one on cybersecurity.

Outside the company, I'm a major benefactor of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and fund the Hacker Spirit Scholarship at my old high school in Mineola.