Samuel Judson

sam@sjudson.com

I am a Machine Learning Security Researcher at Trail of Bits, where I also contribute to the cryptography team. I also occasionally write humor.

I received a doctorate from the Department of Computer Science at Yale University, where I was advised by Ruzica Piskac. My work in both research and industry has focused on the design and implementation of secure, trustworthy, and accountable systems through cryptography, formal methods, rigorous software engineering, and careful consideration of their governance by law and policy.

Prior to my current role researching the security of machine learning-based systems, I have worked on accountability for algorithmic decision making through descriptive program analysis, privacy-preserving formal methods, and the real-world applications of zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable computation.

For my graduate research I received a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Before that I received my undergraduate degree from Marlboro College, advised by Jim Mahoney and Matt Ollis, where my Plan of Concentration focused on cryptographic authentication.


dblp | scholar | github


Research Publications & Preprints

(*equal contribution)

  1.    On Heuristic Models, Assumptions, and Parameters [acm dl] [pdf]

    Samuel Judson and Joan Feigenbaum


    JRC, 2025.


       also arXiv.2201.07413 [arxiv] [pdf]

  2.    Striving Towards Non-Interference with Constitutive Practices [crcl] [pdf]

    Samuel Judson


    JCRCL, 2025.


       invited reply to Constitutive Practices of Administrative Law as Limits on Legal Automation

  3.    soid: A Tool for Legal Accountability for Automated Decision Making [springer] [pdf]

    Samuel Judson, Matthew Elacqua, Filip Cano, Timos Antonopoulos, Bettina Könighofer,


         Scott J. Shapiro, and Ruzica Piskac


    CAV, 2024.

  4.    'Put the Car on the Stand': SMT-based Oracles for Investigating Decisions [acm dl] [pdf]

    Samuel Judson, Matthew Elacqua, Filip Cano, Timos Antonopoulos, Bettina Könighofer,


         Scott J. Shapiro, and Ruzica Piskac


    CSLAW, 2024.


         also arXiv.2305.05731 [arxiv] [pdf]

  5.    Ou: Automating the Parallelization of Zero-Knowledge Protocols [acm dl] [pdf]

    Yuyang Sang*, Ning Luo*, Samuel Judson, Ben Chaimberg, Timos Antonopoulos, Xiao Wang,


         Ruzica Piskac, and Zhong Shao


    CCS, 2023.


         also Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2023/657 [eprint] [pdf]

  6.    Formal XAI via Syntax-Guided Synthesis [springer] [pdf]

    Katrine Bjørner*, Samuel Judson*, Filip Cano, Drew Goldman, Nicholas Shoemaker,


         Ruzica Piskac, and Bettina Könighofer


    AISoLA, 2023.


  7.    Analyzing Intentional Behavior in Autonomous Agents Under Uncertainty [ijcai] [pdf]

    Filip Cano Córdoba, Samuel Judson, Timos Antonopoulos, Katrine Bjørner, Nicholas Shoemaker,


         Scott J. Shapiro, Ruzica Piskac, and Bettina Könighofer


    IJCAI, 2023.


         also arXiv.2307.01532 [arxiv] [pdf]

  8.    ppSAT: Towards Two-Party Private SAT Solving [usenix] [pdf]

    Ning Luo, Samuel Judson, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac, and Xiao Wang


    USENIX Security, 2022.


         also Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2021/1584 [eprint] [pdf]

  9.    Privacy Preserving CTL Model Checking through Oblivious Graph Algorithms [acm dl] [pdf]

    Samuel Judson, Ning Luo, Timos Antonopoulos, and Ruzica Piskac


    WPES@CCS, 2020.


Theses



  1.    (Private) Formal Methods for Rigorously Governable Systems

    Doctoral Dissertation, Yale University, 2024.

  2.    Authentication: Techniques and Theory

    Plan of Concentration (Undergraduate Thesis), Marlboro College, 2016.