Hector Martin (hacker)

Early Life and Education

Hector Martin Cantero was born on September 9, 1990, in Spain. He received his primary and secondary education at the American School of Bilbao, located in the Basque Country of Spain.

Career

Martin became widely recognized in the security and hacking community through his work with fail0verflow, a group formerly known as Team Twiizers. Within that group, he was responsible for reverse engineering and hacking the Nintendo Wii. His work extended across multiple console generations, including the PlayStation 3, for which Sony sued him and other members of the group; that case was eventually settled out of court.

Martin was the first to write an open source driver for the Microsoft Kinect, accomplishing this through reverse engineering. The achievement earned him broad recognition within the open source and security communities.

In 2016, he ported Linux to the PlayStation 4 and demonstrated the feat at the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress, where he ran Steam inside Linux on the console.

Martin also authored usbmuxd, a tool that enables synchronization of data from iPhones to Linux computers.

Since 2011, he has served as an official staff volunteer at the Euskal Encounter, Gipuzkoa Encounter, and Araba Encounter LAN parties in Spain. In that capacity, he coordinates the Free Software area, organizing the "Hack It / Solve It" capture-the-flag cybersecurity competition and the "AI Contest" competition.

Asahi Linux and Apple Silicon

In 2021, Martin founded the Asahi Linux project, an effort to port the Linux operating system to Macs powered by Apple silicon. The project required extensive reverse engineering of Apple's proprietary hardware. During that process, Martin discovered a security vulnerability in the Apple M1 processor, which he disclosed publicly under the name "M1racles."

Martin served as the lead developer of Asahi Linux from its founding until February 2025. On February 7, 2025, he stepped down from directly working on the Linux kernel following a dispute concerning the Rust for Linux initiative. One week later, on February 14, 2025, he resigned as lead developer of the Asahi Linux project.

Notable Work

Across his career, Martin demonstrated a consistent focus on reverse engineering closed hardware platforms and enabling open source software to run on them. His contributions span game console hacking, peripheral driver development, mobile device interoperability tooling, and the porting of Linux to one of the most tightly controlled hardware ecosystems in the consumer market.