One of the Pwnie judges happens to think that lcamtuf’s book, Silence on the Wire, is one of the best examples of what it means to “hack”. It is fitting that a lifetime achievement award nomination goes to someone who embodies the technical spirit of a true hacker.
But, it’s not just a good book that puts Zalewski up for this award. Michal has been a prolific contributor to the security community for decades. His tools and contributions often approach problems from very different than the rest of the field. This results in significant innovation and novelty.
p0f changed how we look at our network traffic and pcaps.
AFL alone may be worthy of a lifetime achievement award (it was the underlying engine for several of the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge finalists).
Michal enjoyed his time at Google, and who wouldn’t have using the largest corpus of fuzzing input in the world and being a source of “very reasonably priced web client exploits” (according to his prior boss). We’ve even heard that he was nice enough to send some people USB Lava-lamps for anniversaries (we would think twice about plugging those in…).