About
Hi! I'm Will Song. I graduated the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign back in 2018 with a degree in Math and Computer Science. My primary work interests are in cryptography and security, but I am always available to solve interesting engineering problems. During my free time, I enjoy exploring mathematics and am currently in the process of some remedial module theory via Jacobson's Basic Algebra I and II, due to extensive gaps of not studying mathematics while working and otherwise not having any rigorous treatment of the subject.
My main PL interests are in Haskell and Rust, and to some extent, Zig, but I am comfortable working in C/C++ style languages as well.
I am also a privacy advocate. If you are transporting secret data, use tools which grant you plausibile deniability. I also do not support the killing of children. If this is somehow controversial, you should look somewhere else.
Work
After university, I have worked three primary jobs.
- Senior Cryptographer at Trail of Bits. (Feb 2019 - July 2024)
- For a brief period of time, I was the lead developer of echidna, an EVM fuzzer written in Haskell.
- I audited a wide variety of software suites for cryptography related bugs. From encrypted hard drives, secrets management, smart contract security, zero-knowledge circuits, secure multiparty computation, you name it.
- I also developed several threshold signing libraries that were eventually integrated into client software.
- Senior Software Engineer at Brevis. (Oct 2024 - Jan 2026)
- Before this role, I spent a few weeks at Lita, and wrote much of their initial test suite as well as optimizing the execution engine for a roughly 10x speedup.
- Various pico circuit optimizations, resulting in faster RISC-V proving times and initial recursion verification times.
- Wrote various core components of the pico GPU prover, which resulted in pico being able to prove ethereum blocks in real time.
- Tech lead for the Sherlock audit, serving as the main engineer responsible for interfacing with the auditing team.
- Senior Software Engineer at Dots. (May 2026 - Current)
- I developed the push to card rail, enabling payouts direct to debit cards modulo bank/card network support. The rail has delivered 18560 successful payouts across 5025 distinct users in the first 15 weeks of being live, moving over 1.5 million US dollars, and is seeing rapid growth. October 2026 moved almost 700 thousand dollars alone.
Open source
Here is a collection of open source projects I have been involved with, either through work or my own free time.
Misc
I have also competed in various CTFs back in the day. My primary teams were 1064CBread in the 2013-2014 era and uiuctf from 2015-2018. I have been a guest on Shellphish (thanks rhelmot) during University as well. I was also fairly active in the contest math community during high school, competing at HMMT, ARML, USAMO, and the likes. I also placed second in my university's freshman math contest.
I maintain a few servers spanning a variety of operating systems. Most notably one of them runs Archlinux and the other runs FreeBSD. I would also like to experiment with OpenBSD and illumos in the future. One of these servers is a long-running H@H node, which is not free. You can send me money via the following addresses:
- ZCash at
t1d6dkG3szLH8wt6jeQXmX6Jsuh8ZGpmqSy - USDC on ETH at
0x5474Be65FA954743407aac0145409b0DBE8b37fd