About Us
Common Defense is an AI cyber lab built by security veterans and AI researchers, the team trusted to protect more than $300B in assets across 1,100+ security engagements.
Meet the team
Richard Ma
CEO & Founder
Richard previously founded Quantstamp (YC W18, 2017) and built it into one of the largest cybersecurity companies in crypto, $150M raised from SoftBank Vision Fund, Pantera, Nomura, Tower Research, and Tencent, with $300B+ in digital assets protected across 1,000+ projects. Before Quantstamp he was a quant at Tower Research Capital. He studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell.
LinkedIn ↗Gelei Deng
Co-Founder · AI Research Engineer
Gelei is first author on MasterKey (NDSS 2024), the foundational paper on automated jailbreaks of ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing, and on PentestGPT (USENIX Security 2024), the canonical paper on LLM-driven offensive security. He is a member of the OpenAI Red Team Network, an Anthropic Bug Bounty winner, and holds a PhD from Nanyang Technological University with 4,600+ Google Scholar citations.
LinkedIn ↗Yi Liu
Co-Founder · AI Research Engineer
Yi's research underpins the OWASP LLM Top 10 and informs technical guidance from NIST, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI. His security tooling has been merged into the official OpenClaw repository, and he holds two Anthropic safety bug bounties. He obtained a PhD at Nanyang Technological University.
LinkedIn ↗Krishna Sriram
Co-Founder · Business & Product
Krishna owns business and product. He spent nine years on the founding team at Quantstamp, where he led business including GTM and fundraising. He co-founded Chainproof, the world's first regulated insurance for digital-asset risks, and has been an active angel since 2019 with investments in companies like Privy (acquired by Stripe), Gem (acquired by OpenSea), Jar (35M users), USD.ai, and Sharespost, among 20+ others. He was a Visiting Lecturer at The Wharton School from 2021 to 2024.
LinkedIn ↗Yuekang Li
Founding AI Research Engineer
Yuekang authored papers across AI, software engineering, and security, and has disclosed hundreds of real-world bugs. He is a Lecturer at UNSW Sydney and an ARC DECRA Fellow, with 6,500+ Google Scholar citations and an h-index of 30. He is a joint Anthropic Jailbreak Bug Bounty winner alongside Gelei Deng and Yi Liu.
LinkedIn ↗Shuqing Li
Founding AI Research Engineer
Shuqing is author on MTTM (ICSE 2023), generating metamorphic tests that bypass Google's commercial content-moderation classifier ~84% of the time, the exact adversarial-evaluation discipline a scam-detection product needs at training and runtime. Shuqing has a PhD background at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with a BEng summa cum laude from SUSTech.
LinkedIn ↗Alex Murashkin
Founding Engineer
Alex served as Head of Infrastructure at Quantstamp from 2017, leading cross-chain bridge security, cloud infrastructure, and operational security, before moving into the company's AI initiatives and Common Defense. He combines deep expertise across Web2 and Web3 security, co-authored multiple Quantstamp R&D papers including the canonical SoK on cross-chain bridge hacks (ICBC 2023), and has spoken at Devcon SEA and other venues. He holds an MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.
LinkedIn ↗Poming Lee
Founding AI Engineer
Poming spent 5+ years as a Senior Research Engineer at Quantstamp before Common Defense, and brings 20+ publications in machine learning and affective computing, from keystroke-emotion analysis to learning classifier systems. He holds two patents, built crypto and equity trading bots before pivoting into security, and earned his PhD in Computer Science from National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan).
LinkedIn ↗Martinet Lee
Founding Member · Incident Response
Martinet was previously a Senior Research Engineer through Head of Developer Relations at Quantstamp, and runs incident response with experience in digital forensics. He is first author (publishing as Sung-Shine Lee) on the canonical SoK on cross-chain bridge hacks (IEEE ICBC 2023, 100+ citations), which established the four-category bridge attack taxonomy used across the field. He lectures at National Yangming Chiaotung University and holds degrees from Waterloo (MMath CS) and NCTU (M.S. Electronic Engineering, B.S. EE).
LinkedIn ↗Kacper Bąk
Founding Member
Kacper was previously a Senior Founding Engineer at Quantstamp and Chief Information Security Officer at Chainproof. Before that he worked at MathWorks (maker of MATLAB), Opera, and Samsung. He is an expert in cybersecurity with deep expertise in Web3 security, software modeling, and verification, and received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo for his work on modeling and analysis of software product lines.
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