One question, three decades, escalating substrates.
Retained Reports — computational portraits on powered-off electronic-ink (installation view).
Pwnshow is the adversarial research agency founded in 2010 (as secYOUre) and directed by Alfonso de Gregorio. We investigate critical cybersecurity challenges at the intersection of technology and society — and we make our findings visible to the publics who must live with them.
Our work follows a single question across every layer of the technological stack: where does vulnerability live, and what does it cost us? We have pursued it through silicon (fault attacks on cryptographic modules), through protocols (the trust architecture of the global PKI), through markets (the economics and ethics of the zero-day trade), through institutions (European cyber policy and standards), through models (the cyber risks of open-weight AI), and through persons (surveillance, memory, and the data of private life).
Most organisations choose one register: research, or policy, or culture. We refuse the choice. Every Pwnshow investigation is built to hold up in three systems of validation at once — peer review, regulatory process, and curatorial selection — because a finding that cannot travel between the lab, the legislature, and the gallery is a finding that society cannot fully use.
Mission
To anticipate and mitigate complex threats — in code, in institutions, and in people — by uncovering their multifaceted roots, and to make those roots visible. We bridge disciplines and methods, from exploit development to political economy to image-making, producing investigations that work simultaneously as research, as policy evidence, and as public culture. We work to prevent foreseeable failures, build resilience against the unexpected, and give society the means to see its own exposure.
Vision
A society that governs its exposure — to code, to inference, to surveillance — with the rigor of its best adversaries and the honesty of its best art.
We hold these as first principles. Read the manifesto →