French computer scientist and hacker (born 1980)
Elie Bursztein, (born 1980) is a French computer scientist and software engineer. He is Google and DeepMind AI cybersecurity technical and research lead.
Education and early career.
Bursztein obtained a computer engineering degree from EPITA in 2004, a master's degree in computer science from Paris Diderot University/ENS in 2005, and a PhD in computer science from École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay in 2008 with a dissertation titled "Anticipation games: Game theory applied to network security".
Before joining Google, Bursztein was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University's Security Laboratory, where he collaborated with Dan Boneh and John Mitchell on web security, game security, and applied cryptographic research. His work at Stanford University included the first cryptanalysis of the inner workings of Microsoft's DPAPI (Data Protection Application Programming Interface), the first evaluation of the effectiveness of private browsing, and many advances to CAPTCHA security and usability.
Bursztein has discovered, reported, and helped fix hundreds of vulnerabilities, including securing Twitter's frame-busting code, exploiting Microsoft's location service to track the position of mobile devices, and exploiting the lack of proper encryption in the Apple App Store to steal user passwords and install unwanted applications.
Career at Google.
Bursztein joined Google in 2012 as a research scientist. He founded the Anti-Abuse Research Team in 2014 and became the lead of the Security and Anti-Abuse Research teams in 2017. In 2023, he became Google and DeepMind AI cybersecurity technical and research lead.
Bursztein's contributions at Google include:
Philanthropy.
In 2023 Elie founded the Etteilla Foundation dedicated to preserving and promoting the rich heritage of playing cards and donated his extensive collection of historical playing cards decks and tarots to it.
Trivia.
Bursztein is an accomplished magician and he posted magic tricks weekly on Instagram during the 2019 pandemic.
In 2014, following his talk on hacking Hearthstone using machine learning, he decided not to make his prediction tool open source at Blizzard Entertainment’s request.
Selected publications.
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References.
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