Paul Makowski's interests include exploitation, program analysis, vulnerability research, reverse engineering and cryptography.

Prior to co-founding PolySwarm, Paul reverse engineered implants and wrote bespoke malware disinfection tools for Fortune 100 clients. Paul authored many of the autonomous program analysis challenges in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, researched partial homomorphic encryption as it applies to protecting programs and network signatures (DARPA CFT), and has co-designed a confidentiality system for a public/private hybrid blockchain for identity management (US DHS). Paul served at the National Security Agency (NSA) for two years as a Global Network Exploitation and Vulnerability Analyst (GNEVA). Paul has competed in and won DEF CON's CTF competition.

Paul holds a patent on detecting exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities using symbolic constraints and has two patents pending on XOM as a basis to defeat ASLR defeats as well as a system for establishing disjoint privilege domains in a single process space.