Three keynotes this year, one on each of the main conference mornings.
Tuesday, October 27
Bruce Potter
Bruce Potter is the founder and CEO of Turngate and a cybersecurity practitioner with nearly three decades of experience. He has served as CISO at organizations including Clear Street, Expel, and the KeyW Corporation, and his background includes DARPA research, red teaming, network engineering, and security leadership. Bruce founded The Shmoo Group and helped run ShmooCon, the Washington, D.C. hacker conference that concluded after a 20-year run.
Wednesday, October 28
Perri Adams
Perri Adams is a fellow at Dartmouth’s Institute for Security Technology Studies (ISTS) and a former Special Assistant to the Director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where she advised stakeholders across the agency and U.S. government on the next generation of AI and cybersecurity technology. Previously, she was a DARPA Program Manager in the Information Innovation Office (I2O), where she created the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC). She is also an adjunct professor at the Alperovitch Institute at Johns Hopkins SAIS and previously served on the organizing committee of the DEF CON Capture the Flag competition.
Thursday, October 29
Mike Spicer
Mike Spicer, known as d4rkm4tter, builds systems and then spends an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how to break them. He started in the RF spectrum, creator of the #WiFiCactus and #WiFiKraken multi-radio monitoring platforms that turned passive wireless collection into an art form (and a conference-floor spectacle). That work led to stages at Black Hat, DEF CON, SAINTCON, ShmooCon, and beyond, plus now Black Badges at both DEF CON and SAINTCON.
His same instincts now live in AI. He designs, red-teams, and breaks agentic systems, RAG pipelines, and the side-channels they inevitably leak. At the same time he helps run the Black Hat NOC as a lead, where the network is massive, the noise is real, and AI is no longer a talking point but actual tooling used under fire.
Day job is Senior Security Product Research at Corelight, focused on rapid prototyping of detection and response capabilities using AI.
On the side he designs hardware, most recently the Apex Storage high-density PCIe Gen4/Gen5/Gen6 NVMe cards built for the exact workloads AI keeps throwing at storage, Wireless hardware, Network detection, and Adversarial AI. Mike keeps showing up with the same core loop: build something useful, break it harder than the other side will, and share the scars.
How keynotes are picked
SAINTCON keynotes are selected separately from the open Call for Papers, recruited by the keynote coordinator listed on the Planning Committee page. Historically we try to land at least one keynote that is a household name in security and one that is not yet, but should be.
Keynote times land on the schedule once the full program is set.
