Author: summercon

Dr. Ang Cui

Tired of spending sleepless nights hunched over a workbench, prodding circuit boards with multimeters and squinting at hex dumps until your eyes bleed? Those days are behind you! We’re giving hardware reverse engineering a robotic makeover: it’s much more satisfying to probe when you’re not doing it by hand. 

We’ve built a human-on-the-loop hardware reverse engineering robot that pokes, prods, and interrogates embedded devices with the relentless enthusiasm of a caffeinated security researcher. Our robot doesn’t need coffee breaks, doesn’t get tired or frustrated; it just keeps doing its thing, transforming the bespoke (read: painfully slow) process of hardware RE into an automated, scalable operation. The robot can interrogate gadgets to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets: scanning PCBs, identifying components, and extracting firmware, all with mechanical precision. 

We’ll conduct a live demonstration of how this works and discuss how we’re utilizing it to enhance our hardware hacking capabilities.

Mark Griffin

Time-Traveling Debugging (TTD) is so much more than just adding an undo button to your normal debugger, but without the appropriate tools and mindset, we risk approaching TTD thinking like Marty McFly instead of a four-dimensional super-alien.

This talk will focus on unlocking the true power of TTD through scripting and clarifying visuals. We’ll start by giving a brief technical foundation of what TTD really is and how it works, what the tooling is available on different platforms, and the basics of how you can get started experimenting with it.

Then we’ll move on to the meat of the talk: sharing some of the power user workflows and tools that help us wrap our heads around the capabilities of TTD. We’ll dive into some of our favorite visuals that can help us understand what’s going on when debugging, giving us liberation instead of feeling like we’re stuck building a ship in a bottle with standard debugging tools. We’ll also show how little improvements really add up in terms of ergonomics and speed when debugging or reversing code, and spending a little extra time scripting or getting to know one’s tools can really pay off.

But we’ll also share the downsides and hardships of a potential time-traveler: the platform-specific nonsense, inconvenient APIs and workflows, and the difficulty having to script and debug our own tools… but by the end of the talk we’ll see the beginnings of tooling that can help us understand code like a planeswalker, saving our time, even if it can’t save our timeline.

Winnona DeSombre Bernsen is an MPP/JD Candidate at Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown Law, and a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. She was formerly an RE / security engineer at Google’s Threat Analysis Group, tracking targeted threats against Google users, and is the founder of offensive security conference DistrictCon, held in Washington DC. In recent years, Winnona has organized policy content at DEF CON and authored multiple pieces on offensive cyber capability proliferation.

J. Gdanski is the Founder and CEO of Evertas, where he has led Evertas’s technical development and underwriting, as well as secured multiple rounds of funding from top investors; he is a security, privacy, and risk expert. J. is also a founder of CryptoISAC.

Prior to launching Evertas, he was a leader in the enterprise blockchain space and was one of the first to work on institutional custody for crypto. In this capacity he served as an early, significant contributor to blockchain consortia including R3 and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, of which he was a founding member. He was an integral part of the first enterprise blockchain RFP and has worked on numerous blockchain-based systems. He was the first dedicated hire in the space for a bulge bracket bank and the world’s largest custodian bank and has presented to regulators, legislators, politicians, and business executives, including from Fortune 50 companies.

Mark Griffin is a veteran security researcher specializing in code analysis, fuzzing, and tooling to augment expert workflows. He has built and released several Binary Ninja plugins and writes about the intersection of security, software, and visualization on his blog. He now focuses on helping people understand code faster and more intuitively through the work at his company Undaunted Development.

Caleb Gross is an offensive security engineer at Aurora Innovation where he secures autonomous vehicles. As prior Director of Capability Development at Bishop Fox, he led a team of offensive security professionals specializing in attack surface research and vulnerability intelligence. Caleb also served as an exploitation operator in the US Department of Defense’s most elite computer network exploitation (CNE) unit.

Vlad Ionescu is the co-founder and CTO of RunSybil, where they are working with a cracked team building AI hackbots and hackbot accessories.

Omar is a Staff Security Engineer focusing on building secure and reliable systems, stopping fraudsters, and in general enabling people to do their best work safely and securely. Aside from hacking, Omar enjoys drinking iced coffee year round, collecting pointy toe boots, and tending to his plants with his lovely assistant, Dumpling.