James Kettle


Bio

James 'albinowax' Kettle is the Director of Research at PortSwigger, the makers of Burp Suite. He's best known for pioneering novel web attack techniques, and publishing them at major conferences like Black Hat USA, at which he's presented for eight consecutive years.

He also loves exploring and advising on innovative tool concepts for security professionals, many of which have since become industry standard. Examples include introducing OAST via Burp Collaborator, bulk parameter discovery via Param Miner, billion-request attacks with Turbo Intruder, and human-style scanning with Backslash Powered Scanner.

His best-known research is HTTP Desync Attacks, which popularised HTTP Request Smuggling. Other popular attack techniques that can be traced back to his research include web cache poisoning, the single-packet attack, server-side template injection, and password reset poisoning. He's also the designer behind many of the topics and labs that make up the Web Security Academy, and serves on the Black Hat Europe review board.

 

Contact

James Kettle Consulting:

PortSwigger:

X, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn

Recent presentations


Latest published talk: Listen to the whispers: web timing attacks that actually work


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Past presentations


Research Portfolio

HTTP Request Smuggling

Web Cache Poisoning


Tools & automation

Other highlights

How I approach research

Inspiration: gareth, magic mac, lcamtuf, filedescriptor, agarri, fin1te, ezequiel pereira, homakov, irsdl, .mario, insertScript, sirdarckcat, kkotowicz, ush.it, webstersprodigy, kuza55, neal poole and many others.

Misc