After we conjugated through all possible permutations of "apply ML wrongly to a security problem which is, in fact, adversarial", I really do not like how some people seem to like going through "conjugate through all possible permutations of how these can be broken"....

infosec academia: solving problems no one had since 2004

Infosec academia found Spectre and Meltdown, built Nexmon, weaponized Rowhammer, ended MD5, and built more effective forks of AFL than I can count. Infosec academia is doing just fine.

Disagree on Spectre and Meltdown; Jann Horn and Paul Kocher were not infosec academia and were the first discoverers (academia reverse engineered from Linux changes); AFL forks: Not sure whether stringent evaluation will confirm the "more effective" claim. Agreed on Nexmon & RH.

I am not academia either.

So lots of bad papers come out of infosec academia, but certainly, there is a lot of good stuff coming from academia. With the exception of Spectre/Meltdown, the side channel space is completely dominated by academia. CFI started in academia. etc.