Summary
Ken Johnson is a Staff Research Development Engineer with 11 years of hands-on experience in vulnerability research, exploit development, and systems-level engineering, currently at Tenable. He runs a home lab of servers for projects ranging from hybrid-fuzzing clusters to log analysis, reflecting a practical, experiment-driven approach to security and tooling. Ken’s work spans penetration testing, 0-day research, protocol libraries (SSH, SMB, SNMP), static analysis, and compiler/VM internals, showing uncommon breadth across both offensive research and low-level systems programming. He is passionate about language design and crafting elegant, high-performance code, and he enjoys digging into nitty-gritty technical details that others often avoid. Based in Saint Paul, MN, he pairs a Master of Engineering in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins with a track record of shipping research-driven security capabilities at scale.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng Computer Science, Master of Engineering - MEng Computer Science at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering
Bachelor of Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Science Computer Science at Augsburg College
French, Dutch