Philippe Laulheret Uses Ethical Hacking to Find Flaws

Philippe Laulheret is a senior vulnerability researcher who uses ethical hacking and Capture The Flag experience to find software, hardware and physical security flaws before attackers can exploit them. In a recent Humans of Talos interview he described bypassing a biometric fingerprint reader with a green onion as an example of those tests.

“Basically, my job is to find vulnerabilities in software, hardware, or things physically,” Laulheret said. “We pick targets we think matter, and then other teams write detection rules so customers are protected.”

Laulheret looks for weaknesses across software, devices and physical systems. He reports findings so detection teams can build protections and set priorities based on potential impact. His team selects targets rather than waiting for external requests.

The green onion experiment tested a fingerprint sensor with an unconventional material to see if it would authenticate a nonhuman print. Laulheret used the test to check how a real sensor responds to simple, everyday items and to identify practical attack paths that theoretical models might miss.

He traced his interest in reverse engineering and hacking to childhood curiosity. Laulheret trained in a French engineering school with intensive math and physics, then studied electrical and computer engineering and developed an interest in software and computer vision.

Early in his career he worked for four years at a U.S. design studio creating interactive installations while practicing security challenges in Capture The Flag competitions. He later joined a cybersecurity startup in New York and moved to the Pacific Northwest to focus full-time on vulnerability research.

Laulheret described research as a puzzle: investigators must understand how a system works and then try to break it. The goal of his work is to produce actionable technical findings that let other teams deploy detection rules and protections and to disclose flaws before attackers can weaponize them.

The Humans of Talos segment covered techniques from software reverse engineering to physical sensor testing and highlighted hands-on practice, competitions and an engineering background as foundations for his work.