James Kettle
Director Of Research at PortSwigger
England, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarJames Kettle is Director of Research at PortSwigger with 12 years of hands-on experience in web security, leading research and tooling around vulnerability detection for Burp Suite. He combines leadership with deep technical work—contributing core logic and advanced detection techniques to projects like param-miner and http-request-smuggler, and enhancing plugins such as ActiveScan++ to catch real-world CVEs. Based in England, he’s known for pragmatic exploitation techniques (dual-TE, reverse-timeout) and for integrating scanning ecosystems (Burp–ZGrab) to scale discovery. His blend of product-focused research and low-level protocol expertise helps translate obscure attack vectors into reliable, production-ready scanner checks.
12 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
68reputation
6kreached
2answers
1question
Github Skills (20)
burp10
python10
vulnerability-scanners10
web-application-security10
it-security10
audit10
java10
security10
javas10
audit-logging10
code-auditing10
web-security10
scanning10
auditing10
audit-trail10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
PortSwigger/param-miner
Aug 2017 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 2 reviews, 326 commits in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the development of the core logic and functionality of the 'param-miner' project, which is designed to identify backend parameters. Their contributions include implementing the ability to guess and support frontend parameters by adding new insertion points and attack vectors. They also refactored portions of the codebase and incorporated features to detect and report potential vulnerabilities related to cache poisoning, demonstrating a strong understanding of web security principles.
albinowax/ActiveScanPlusPlus
Jun 2014 - Dec 2020
ActiveScan++ Burp Suite Plugin
Role in this project:Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:1 release, 57 commits, 20 PRs in 6 years 6 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on enhancing the security posture of the Burp Suite plugin, ActiveScan++. Their contributions involved identifying and implementing checks for various vulnerabilities, including CVE-2014-6271 (shell command injection), CVE-2015-2080 (JetLeak), and CVE-2017-5638 (Struts2 RCE). The user also added checks for edge-side include vulnerabilities and Rails file disclosure (CVE-2019-5418), improving the plugin's ability to detect potential security flaws. Furthermore, they refactored the host header scanning to avoid using custom insertion points and added a Solr XXE check.
burp
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