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On February 3rd I will be speaking at Black Hat DC. The talk is about fuzzing. Today Microsoft has its SDL, Abobe has apparently started fuzzing its own products and other companies are doing the same as well. The bottom line is that fuzzing is getting harder for us. In the talk I will explain how to create a new type of fuzzer by combining static analysis metrics and dynamic analysis techniques. This new approach will ease the process of fuzzing by totally removing the data-modeling part that is usually necessary with generation-based fuzzers. At the same time it will have better results than mutation-based fuzzers. I have written about some of the techniques/metrics used in the fuzzer in my previous blog posts. So to have a taste of the talk here are a few links: cyclomatic complexity, loop detection and code coverage.

Anyway if you happen to be in DC during Black Hat or in NYC a few days after (4 -7 February) and you want to talk with me about:

1. Reverse engineering and the like : you have a problem that’s driving you crazy, you can solve one of those problems for me or you want to show me something very cool you are working on.
2. Our products: you want more info, you know how to improve them, you want  to congratulate me because they are *so* cool
3. You feel generous and want to offer me a beer
4. You want to insult me because this blog post is *very* annoying

Send me an email!

After the conference I will do a follow-up post with slides, white paper, code and what you have missed at the conference.

Cheers,

Vincenzo

Last November Michael Meier of Dortmund University invited me to give a guest lecture on a topic of my choice in his class about reactive security.  The topic we decided on was formal methods in reverse engineering. January 20th was the date of my guest lecture.

I was a bit nervous because I knew the students knew very little or nothing about formal methods and reverse engineering. I decided not to scare them away with assembly code or heavy math and to keep things general instead. The idea was to present current problems in reverse engineering caused by growing size and complexity of today’s software and how formal methods might be able to help us overcome these problems.

In the end I decided to give a brief introduction to abstract interpretation, meta languages, dynamic instrumentation, and taint tracking as four potential ways of cutting down on complexity which are all quite different.

I think the talk went rather well and I think I made the right decision with the topic. The students asked me some good questions during and after the talk and I like to believe that I did not bore them to death.

The slides of my guest lecture are available here although they are unfortunately in German language.

[slideshare id=3002487&doc=revengdortmund-100127054621-phpapp01]