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Jason L. Wright

Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Idaho State University · Pocatello, Idaho, USA

About

Jason L. Wright is a clinical associate professor of computer science at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho. He was a member of the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge infrastructure team, where he helped build the DECREE operating environment and built the independent scoring system used to verify the final results of the competition. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

Research interests

Education

Awards and honors

Publications

Journal and Magazine Articles

  1. 2027

    The Cognition Gap: What the Cyber Grand Challenge Revealed About Autonomous Cyber Reasoning

    J. L. Wright. IEEE Security & Privacy, Cyber Hard Problems special issue, Jan./Feb. 2027 (to appear).

    A ten-year retrospective on the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge. CGC solved the orchestration of autonomous vulnerability discovery, exploitation, and patching, but exposed a cognition gap along two axes, discovery and exploitation, that large language models are closing unevenly.

    DOI: 10.1109/MSEC.2026.3740004 Accepted manuscript (PDF)

    © 2026 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

  2. 2018

    Operating System Doppelgängers: The Creation of Indistinguishable, Deterministic Environments

    J. L. Wright, C. Eagle, and T. Vidas. BSD Magazine, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 32–44, Feb. 2018.

    PDF Article in the issue (Internet Archive)

  3. 2013

    Analyses of Two End-User Software Vulnerability Exposure Metrics (Extended Version)

    J. L. Wright, M. McQueen, and L. Wellman. Information Security Technical Report, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 173–184, May 2013.

    DOI: 10.1016/j.istr.2013.02.002 Preprint as submitted, Oct. 2012 (PDF)

  4. 2006

    Cryptography as an Operating System Service: A Case Study

    A. D. Keromytis, J. L. Wright, T. de Raadt, and M. Burnside. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 1–38, Feb. 2006.

    DOI: 10.1145/1124153.1124154

Conference and Workshop Papers

  1. 2026

    The Residual Nondeterminism Gap in Forensic Record-and-Replay

    J. L. Wright and T. L. Baldwin. Availability, Reliability and Security: ARES 2026 International Workshops, LNCS vol. 16901, pp. 614–632, Springer, 2026.

    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-35579-9_33 Accepted manuscript (PDF)

  2. 2018

    BP: DECREE: A Platform for Repeatable and Reproducible Security Experiments

    L. Yan, B. Price, M. Zhivich, B. Caswell, C. Eagle, M. Frantzen, H. Sorenson, M. Thompson, T. Vidas, J. Wright, V. Rivet, S. C. VanWinkle, and C. Wood. IEEE Cybersecurity Development (SecDev), pp. 11–20, Sept. 2018.

    DOI: 10.1109/SecDev.2018.00010

  3. 2017

    Where Am I? Operating System and Virtualization Identification Without System Calls

    J. L. Wright. Cyber Security Symposium, University of Idaho, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Apr. 2017. Presented; the announced proceedings were never published.

    PDF

  4. 2013

    Estimating Software Vulnerabilities: A Case Study Based on the Misclassification of Bugs in MySQL Server

    J. L. Wright, J. W. Larsen, and M. McQueen. International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), pp. 72–81, Sept. 2013.

    DOI: 10.1109/ARES.2013.14 Preprint (OSTI)

  5. 2012

    Analyses of Two End-User Software Vulnerability Exposure Metrics

    J. L. Wright, M. McQueen, and L. Wellman. International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), pp. 1–10, Aug. 2012.

    DOI: 10.1109/ARES.2012.33 Preprint (OSTI)

  6. 2012

    Mining Bug Databases for Unidentified Software Vulnerabilities

    D. Wijayasekara, M. Manic, J. L. Wright, and M. McQueen. International Conference on Human System Interactions (HSI), pp. 89–96, June 2012.

    DOI: 10.1109/HSI.2012.22 Preprint (OSTI)

Show 8 older papersHide older papers
  1. 2012

    Concept of Operations for Data Fusion Visualization

    T. R. McJunkin, R. L. Boring, M. A. McQueen, L. P. Shunn, J. L. Wright, D. I. Gertman, O. Linda, K. McCarty, and M. Manic. Advances in Safety, Reliability and Risk Management (ESREL 2011), pp. 634–640, CRC Press, 2012.

    DOI: 10.1201/b11433-89 Preprint (OSTI)

  2. 2011

    Are Vulnerability Disclosure Deadlines Justified?

    M. McQueen, J. L. Wright, and L. Wellman. International Workshop on Security Measurements and Metrics (MetriSec), pp. 96–101, Sept. 2011.

    DOI: 10.1109/Metrisec.2011.9 Preprint (OSTI)

  3. 2011

    Fuzzy Logic Based Anomaly Detection for Embedded Network Security Cyber Sensor

    O. Linda, M. Manic, T. Vollmer, and J. Wright. IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Cyber Security (CICS), pp. 202–209, Apr. 2011.

    DOI: 10.1109/CICYBS.2011.5949392 Preprint (OSTI)

  4. 2010

    Neural Network Architecture Selection Analysis with Application to Cryptography Location

    J. L. Wright and M. Manic. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 1–6, July 2010.

    DOI: 10.1109/IJCNN.2010.5596315

  5. 2010

    The Analysis of Dimensionality Reduction Techniques in Cryptographic Object Code Classification

    J. L. Wright and M. Manic. International Conference on Human System Interaction (HSI), pp. 157–162, May 2010.

    DOI: 10.1109/HSI.2010.5514572 Preprint (OSTI)

  6. 2009

    Neural Network Approach to Locating Cryptography in Object Code

    J. L. Wright and M. Manic. IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA), pp. 1–4, Sept. 2009.

    DOI: 10.1109/ETFA.2009.5347226 Preprint (OSTI)

  7. 2009

    Time Synchronization in Hierarchical TESLA Wireless Sensor Networks

    J. L. Wright and M. Manic. International Symposium on Resilient Control Systems (ISRCS), pp. 36–39, Aug. 2009.

    DOI: 10.1109/ISRCS.2009.5251365 Preprint (OSTI)

  8. 2000

    Transparent Network Security Policy Enforcement

    A. D. Keromytis and J. L. Wright. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 215–226, June 2000.

    PDF

Book Chapters

  1. 2004

    Experiences Enhancing Open Source Security in the POSSE Project

    J. M. Smith, M. B. Greenwald, S. Ioannidis, A. D. Keromytis, B. Laurie, D. Maughan, D. Rahn, and J. L. Wright. Free/Open Source Software Development, S. Koch, Ed., pp. 242–257, Idea Group Publishing, 2004. Reprinted in Global Information Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, F. B. Tan, Ed., pp. 1587–1598, 2007.

Theses and Reports

  1. 2014

    Software Vulnerabilities: Lifespans, Metrics, and Case Study

    J. L. Wright. M.S. thesis, University of Idaho, May 2014.

    PDF

  2. 2008

    Recommended Practice for Securing Control System Modems

    J. R. Davidson and J. L. Wright. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Jan. 2008.

    Report (OSTI)

Patents

  1. 2012

    Method and System for Providing Secure One-Way Transfer of Data

    E. M. Harvey, W. A. Mitzen, J. L. Wright, J. M. Sleggs, and L. A. Wimble. U.S. Patent 8,250,235 B2, Aug. 21, 2012.

    Patent (Google Patents)

Talks

  1. 2025

    Examination of Kernel Level Anti-Cheat Measures

    J. L. Wright. BSides Idaho Falls, Idaho Falls, Idaho, 2025.

  2. 2019

    Operating System Doppelgängers

    J. L. Wright. BSides Idaho Falls, Idaho Falls, Idaho, 2019.

  3. 2008

    Finding Cryptography in Object Code

    J. L. Wright. Security Education Conference Toronto (SecTor), Toronto, Ontario, Oct. 2008.

    Paper (OSTI)

  4. 2008

    When Hardware Is Wrong, or ‘They Can Fix It in Software’

    J. Wright. NYC BSD Conference, New York, NY, Oct. 2008.

    Slides (PDF)

  5. 2006

    OpenBSD/sparc64

    J. L. Wright. NYC BSD Conference, New York, NY, 2006.

Software & Data

Teaching

Show 2 older coursesHide older courses
  • CS 1181: Computer Science and Programming I

    Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022

  • CS 4499/5599: Special Topics: Databases

    Fall 2023

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