Tavis Ormandy
Tavis Ormandy | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Hacker |
| Employer | |
| Website | github |
Tavis Ormandy is an English computer security white hat hacker. Until October 10, 2025[1], he was employed by Google and was formerly part of Google's Project Zero team.[2]
Notable discoveries
[edit | edit source]Ormandy is credited with discovering severe vulnerabilities in LibTIFF,[3] Sophos' antivirus software[4] and Microsoft Windows.[5] With Natalie Silvanovich he discovered a severe vulnerability in FireEye products in 2015.[6]
His findings with Sophos' products led him to write a 30-page paper entitled "Sophail: Applied attacks against Sophos Antivirus" in 2012, which concludes that the company was "working with good intentions" but is "ill-equipped to handle the output of one co-operative security researcher working in his spare time" and that its products shouldn't be used on high-value systems.[7]
He also created an exploit in 2014 to demonstrate how a vulnerability in glibc known since 2005 could be used to gain root access on an affected machine running a 32-bit version of Fedora.[8]
In 2016, he demonstrated multiple vulnerabilities in Trend Micro Antivirus on Windows related to the Password Manager,[9] and vulnerabilities in Symantec security products.
In February 2017, he found and reported a critical bug in Cloudflare's infrastructure leaking user-sensitive data along with requests affecting millions of websites around the world which has been referred to as Cloudbleed (in reference to the Heartbleed bug that Google co-discovered).[10]
On or around May 15, 2023, he found and reported a vulnerability called Zenbleed (CVE-2023-20593) affecting all Zen 2 class processors.
In September 2024, he was involved in discovering a microcode vulnerability affecting certain AMD Zen based processors.[11][12][13] (CVE-2024-56161)
References
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External links
[edit | edit source]- Tavis Ormandy publications indexed by Google Scholar
- "Sophail: Applied attacks against Sophos Antivirus" - Ormandy's paper on insecurities in Sophos products
- Taviso on GitHub
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