Matthew Westwood-Hill

Matthew Westwood-Hill is a Cyber Security practitioner, independent researcher, and toolsmith with more than 20 years of experience spanning digital forensics, incident response, and information security leadership.

He is the Founder of Cognisn, an independent Cyber Security research and tooling venture focused on the security of AI and agentic tooling ecosystems. Through Cognisn he develops security tooling, MCP server architectures, and applied research into how large language models integrate with external tools, data sources, and the software supply chains around them. The work presented at this conference is conducted independently under Cognisn.

Prior to founding Cognisn, Matthew served as Chief Information Security Officer at Frontier Software, led the security function at the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), served as Principal Investigator at CyberCX managing complex digital forensic and cyber breach response engagements, and led the Privacy and Cyber Response, Computer Forensics, and eDiscovery practice for Oceania at Ernst & Young.

Matthew's research examines the security architecture and threat modelling of AI tooling ecosystems, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP), browser extension attack surfaces, and the trust and review gaps that emerge when security-relevant behaviour is determined at runtime rather than at review time. He is an active developer of MCP servers, security tooling, and relay architectures, and is a graduate of the SANS Technology Institute.

He is based in Sydney, Australia.