Tim Vidas
Principal Engineer at Kernelcon
Omaha, Nebraska, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTim Vidas is a Principal Engineer at AWS with 12 years of focused experience in threat intelligence, platform security, and digital forensics, blending deep research credentials (Ph.D. work at Carnegie Mellon) with hands-on operational security leadership. He led DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge competition infrastructure, helped pioneer automated program analysis, and has a track record of translating cutting-edge research into practical defenses for cloud and enterprise environments. A decorated competitive security practitioner and organizer—DEF CON CTF core organizer and black badge recipient—he also co-founded Kernelcon and DC402 to grow the cybersecurity community. Tim’s career spans senior roles at Secureworks and influential academic teaching and research appointments, reflecting a rare mix of product, incident response, and academic output published in top venues. Based in Omaha, he combines strategic technical direction with mentoring and community building, and he’s known for turning high-risk research into deployable security capabilities—meow.
12 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
MS Computer Science, MS Computer Science at University of Nebraska at OmahaPhD Electrical and Computer Engineering, PhD Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon UniversityPhD (incomplete) Computer Science, PhD (incomplete) Computer Science at Naval Postgraduate School
Github Skills (17)
java7
signal7
kotlin7
kernel6
android6
messenger6
popularity5
connected3
tuya2
monitoring2
ifttt2
internet2
mqtt1
linux1
internet-of-things1
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
DEFCON402/website
Nov 2017 - Mar 2019
DC402 website
Contributions:18 commits, 11 pushes in 1 year 3 months
tvidas/presentations
Jan 2017 - Feb 2022
Contributions:3 pushes, 1 branch in 5 years 1 month
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