Meredith L. Patterson

Early Life

Patterson grew up in and around Houston, Texas, where she lived for approximately 24 years. She attended Kingwood High School from 1990 to 1994. During her time in Houston, she supported herself through a variety of roles including website design, technical writing, math instruction, and restaurant criticism for the Houston Press. In 1999, she served as treasurer of the Mars Society Houston branch and, at age 22, traveled above the Arctic Circle as a NASA correspondent for a Mars simulation mission.

She later relocated to Iowa City, Iowa, to pursue graduate studies at the University of Iowa, where she earned a Master's degree in linguistics and a PhD in computer science. Her undergraduate work in linguistics was completed at the University of Houston.

Computer Science Career

Patterson is best known in the security community for her work at the intersection of computational linguistics and computer security. In 2005, she presented the first parse tree validation technique for preventing SQL injection attacks at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. This approach was later implemented in her open-source "Dejector" library, which integrates directly with PostgreSQL.

She also developed a support vector machine data mining library embedded within PostgreSQL, enabling a "query-by-example" extension to SQL that allows database administrators to construct complex data mining queries using positive and negative example inputs. This work was initially funded through Google's Summer of Code program and was presented at CodeCon 2006. It subsequently formed the technical foundation of her startup, Osogato, which combined the data mining database with acoustic feature extraction to help users build and discover music playlists. Osogato was launched at SuperHappyDevHouse.

Prior to founding Osogato, Patterson worked for Mu Security (later known as Mu Dynamics). She has contributed to several open-source database projects, including SciTools, Klein, and QBE, and has written patches for PostgreSQL. She is also credited with contributing to the Summer of Code project Firekeeper.

In 2009 at Black Hat, Dan Kaminsky presented joint research conducted with Patterson and her husband Len Sassaman that exposed widespread vulnerabilities in the internet's certificate authority infrastructure. Their findings demonstrated that existing web browsers could be deceived into accepting fraudulent X.509 certificates, revealing systemic weaknesses in the trust model underlying secure web communications.

Writing Career

As a science fiction author, Patterson has published short stories in magazines including Fortean Bureau and Strange Horizons, as well as in anthologies such as The Doom of Camelot and The Children of Cthulhu. She is also credited as a contributor to the Steve Jackson Games publication GURPS Villains. Her poetry has drawn on her scientific interests; her poem "Leaving Devon Island" references the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada.

Blogging and Journalism

Patterson has maintained an active presence as a blogger, writing on topics including copyright reform, biohacking, civil rights, the Military Commissions Act, and programming languages. She has contributed multiple articles to BoingBoing.

In spring 2008, she co-authored a paper with David Chaum and Len Sassaman, presented at a USENIX workshop, criticizing the insufficient attention given to user privacy in the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) initiative.

Since late 2015, Patterson has co-edited the blog Status:451, which identifies freedom of speech as its founding principle, alongside a co-editor using the pseudonym ClarkHat.

Personal

Patterson married cryptographer and CodeCon co-organizer Len Sassaman following a public proposal at CodeCon 2006. They remained together until Sassaman's death in 2011. Patterson has been diagnosed with autism in adulthood and has spoken publicly about her experiences navigating the technology community as a woman on the spectrum.