Eric Kilmer
Principal Security Engineer at Trail of Bits
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEric Kilmer is a Principal Security Engineer based in Boston with 11 years of hands-on experience in program and binary analysis, reverse engineering, tooling, and secure build systems. At Trail of Bits he progressed from Security Engineer to Principal, applying deep expertise in symbolic execution, fuzzing, and syscall modeling to improve analysis platforms like angr, Manticore, and Driller. He is a prolific open-source contributor focused on build/reproducibility and cross-platform packaging—helping improve vcpkg, mcsema, LIEF, and PE parsing libraries—which underscores his knack for making complex toolchains reliable and automatable. His background includes systems-level work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and internships at Symantec and ARL, giving him both research rigor and production experience. Notably, he often bridges tooling and security research, adding practical debugging, Docker/vcpkg automation, and libc/syscall fixes that materially improve binary analysis workflows.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science and Engineering, Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State University
Github Skills (58)
dependency-management10
debugging10
libc10
docker10
c-language10
lib10
package-management10
python10
testing10
windows10
memory-management10
linux10
build-system10
cmake10
c1110
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
trailofbits/manticore
Mar 2019 - Jan 2023
Symbolic execution tool
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:135 reviews, 168 commits, 130 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Eric contributed to the Manticore symbolic execution tool by fixing bugs related to relative paths in Solidity compiler integration and updating dependencies such as Unicorn. They implemented features, including a partial implementation of the recvfrom syscall and improving symbolic file handling with wildcards. Furthermore, the user addressed several issues in the Linux platform's system call implementations, enhancing the tool's capabilities for binary analysis and security testing.
symbolic-executionz3pythonbinary-analysisemulation
trailofbits/pe-parse
Jan 2020 - Dec 2021
Principled, lightweight C/C++ PE parser
Role in this project:Backend Developer & Software Architect
Backend Developer & Software ArchitectContributions:10 reviews, 16 commits, 21 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Eric primarily contributed to the core C/C++ PE parsing library, enhancing its functionality and robustness. Their work includes implementing Unicode support, optimizing code by passing resources by const pointers, and fixing memory management issues, particularly around the cleanup process of malformed PE files. Furthermore, the user demonstrated architectural understanding by refactoring code to use `offsetof` to resolve undefined behavior and improve overall code quality, along with improving the testing framework with Catch2.
cppparserpe-formatportable-executable
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