Meredith L. Patterson

In 2009 at BlackHat, Dan Kaminsky presented joint work with Patterson and Sassaman, revealing pervasive flaws in the Internet's certificate authority infrastructure. Their work revealed that existing web browsers could be fooled into accepting fraudulent X.509 certificates.

In spring of 2008, she published a paper with David Chaum and Len Sassaman in a USENIX workshop criticizing the lack of attention paid to user-privacy in the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) computer.

A two-time CodeCon presenter, Patterson married the co-organizer of the event, Len Sassaman, after a public proposal at CodeCon 2006. As Sassaman was also famous among the geek community, their marriage was held up as an example of a geek power couple. They were together until Sassman's death in 2011.

Patterson is known for her work in computational linguistics and its applications to computer security. In 2005, she presented the first parse tree validation technique for stopping SQL injection attacks at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Patterson lived in and around Houston for 24 years before moving to Iowa City, Iowa, to pursue her Master's degree in linguistics and PhD in computer science. Patterson attended Kingwood High School from 1990 to 1994. She supported herself working as a website designer, technical writer, math teacher, and restaurant critic for the Houston Press. She served as the treasurer of the Mars Society Houston Branch in 1999. That same year, at age 22, she traveled above the Arctic Circle as a NASA correspondent for a Mars simulation mission.

Meredith L. Patterson (born April 30, 1977) is an American technologist, science fiction writer, and journalist. She has spoken at numerous industry conferences on a wide range of topics. She is also a blogger and software developer, and a leading figure in the biopunk movement.