Michael Colburn
Senior Security Researcher at Octane
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Colburn is a Senior Security Researcher based in Montreal with a decade of hands-on experience in applied security engineering and research. He progressed through Trail of Bits from intern to senior engineer before joining Octane, focusing on vulnerability discovery, exploit analysis, and secure design across smart contract and traditional systems. An active QA/test automation contributor to the well-known Slither static analyzer, he has written detailed Solidity test suites that help catch subtle issues like incorrect shifts, deprecated standards, and tautologies. Michael pairs an MASc in Information Systems Security with practical software development experience from government and academic research roles, giving him both theoretical rigor and production-hardened instincts. Colleagues rely on him for meticulous testing strategies and for turning obscure protocol edge-cases into reproducible detections. He brings a detective’s attention to detail and a track record of improving tooling that scales security assurance.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Applied Science Information Systems Security, Master of Applied Science Information Systems Security at Concordia UniversityBachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at Mount Allison University
Github Skills (6)
static-analysis10
solidity10
ethereum10
test-automation10
testing10
vyper4
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
crytic/slither
Apr 2020 - May 2021
Static Analyzer for Solidity and Vyper
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:9 commits, 2 PRs, 2 branches in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the project by adding comprehensive tests for various Solidity code vulnerabilities and design issues, including incorrect shift operations, missing inheritance implementations, enum conversions, multiple constructors, deprecated standards usage, divide-before-multiply operations, tautologies, and similar variable names. Their work involved writing test cases in the `tests/test_detectors.py` file and creating corresponding Solidity test contracts to validate the effectiveness of the vulnerability detection mechanisms. These tests ensure the static analysis tool, Slither, functions correctly.
static-analyzerethereumsoliditysmart-contractsanalyzer
tesla809/building-secure-contracts
Apr 2022 - May 2022
Guidelines and training material to write secure smart contracts
Contributions:2 commits in 15 days
securesecure-smart-contractsethereumtraining-materialblockchain
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