Yanick Fratantonio
Senior Research Scientist at Google
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYanick Fratantonio is a Senior Research Scientist at Google with 13 years of experience specializing in systems security, malware analysis, reverse engineering, and program analysis across Android, Windows, and Linux. He bridges academic rigor and practical impact—publishing 30+ peer-reviewed papers, teaching a public mobile security course, and speaking at venues like Black Hat and IEEE S&P. Prior roles include assistant professor at EURECOM and senior researcher at Cisco Talos, and he holds a PhD from UC Santa Barbara. Yanick contributes to open-source security tooling (notably leading backend and devops work on Google’s Magika project) and remains active in the CTF community as a member of Shellphish and OOO. He’s known for exposing systemic mobile flaws and for applying machine learning to detect file content types and automate security analysis.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Master, Computer Science, Master, Computer Science at University of Illinois at ChicagoMaster, Computer Engineering, Master, Computer Engineering at Politecnico di MilanoDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara
English, Italian
Github Skills (16)
shellcode10
hex10
linux10
assembly10
refactoring10
base-conversion10
python10
assemble10
assembler10
x8610
onnx9
reverse-engineering9
dependency-management9
deep-learning8
debugging8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
reyammer/shellnoob
Apr 2013 - Mar 2022
A shellcode writing toolkit
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 review, 16 commits, 5 PRs in 9 years
Contributions summary:Yanick contributed significantly to the `shellnoob` project, a toolkit for writing shellcodes. Their initial commit established the project with core functionality. Subsequent commits involved improvements to the `opcode_to_ins` feature and refactoring of the codebase, including the implementation of hex_to_exe, indicating an understanding of low-level programming concepts and shellcode manipulation. Further revisions introduced completec, and made adjustments to improve overall functionality.
shellcode
google/magika
Feb 2024 - Jun 2026
Fast and accurate AI powered file content types detection
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:5 releases, 161 reviews, 403 PRs in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Yanick primarily focused on code refactoring and dependency management by removing a dependency on the 'rich' package. They updated comments within the code to improve clarity. Significant changes were made involving a major refactor and clean-up of the core Magika Python module, including optimizations and design improvements. In addition, they worked on the clean-up of logger setup and usage, updating the CLI.
aicontent-typedeep-learningfiletypekeras-classification-models
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