Appearances

What I talk about#

My talks tend to live at the intersection of three uncomfortable truths: large language models are now writing meaningful portions of the code we ship; the agentic systems we are building around those models can take real actions in the world; and prompt injection — the foundational attack on this stack — is not a problem we are going to solve cleanly. Most of my appearances try to take that honestly rather than catastrophically, and walk through what defensive engineering looks like when you can't trust the model's intent and you can't realistically slow the rollout down.

A lot of what I cover is grounded in my earlier production work at Dropbox: how to sandbox autonomous agents so the blast radius stays small when something goes wrong, how to design tool interfaces (including MCP servers) that don't quietly hand attackers a foothold, and what OAuth, token lifecycle, and least-privilege access really need to look like when an agent — not a human — is the principal making the request. I also spend time on the human side of the problem: how security teams should engage with AI features before they ship, and how to give engineers patterns that raise the floor without slowing the work.

Recurring topics#

• Agent security and sandboxing — runtime monitoring, permission models, and the design choices that decide whether a compromised agent is a near-miss or an incident.
• Prompt injection in depth — why direct, indirect, and tool-chained variants demand different mitigations, and where defense-in-depth actually pays off.
• MCP and tool-use protocols — building tool surfaces that resist over-eager LLMs and don't leak privilege across boundaries.
• OAuth and identity for AI — what token lifecycle and revocation look like when an agent is acting on a user's behalf across services.
• Securing LLM-generated code — making model output safer by default rather than relying on humans to catch every mistake in review.

Where you'll find me#

I speak at security and AI-focused conferences (Cackalackycon, CactusCon, Lakera AI), on industry podcasts and livestreams (Defense in Depth, Unprompted, Off By One Security), and occasionally on company-hosted panels and webinars. The list below covers the public appearances I can talk about — most include video, slides, or both. If you're organizing a conference, panel, or podcast on AI security, agent safety, or production LLM defense, reach out — I'm happy to talk about new formats and audiences.