Vegas, baby, Vegas
It’s that time again. It’s 110 degrees in Las Vegas and if that wasn’t causing the locals enough worry, the yearly invasion of hackers this week certainly will. Expect to see more humungous LCD displays blue screen and guys walking around in the heat wearing black leather trenchcoats (that’s dedication!).
Anyway, it looks like there will be a lot of cool stuff happening at BlackHat, and here are some of the talks and events that I am looking forward to on Day 1:
- Alex Ionescu, “Pointers and Handles”: I love the smell of kernel exploits in the morning.
- Dan Kaminsky, “Black Ops 2008: It’s the End of the Cache As We Know it”: As if I would miss Dan’s talk this year. Besides, if Dan is going to try and propose a last-minute Pwnie Award nomination, I have to be there.
- And of course, The Pwnie Awards! Alex Sotirov, the other Pwnie Judges, and I have been working really hard on the awards for this year, so make sure to come out and laugh at support your peers.
- Rafal Wojtczuk, “Subverting the Xen Hypervisor”: Backdooring and rootkitting Xen. While I think that hyperjacking (ala BluePill and Vitriol) will not be possible for long since eventually most servers will run in virtual machines, rootkits within existing hypervisors could become be the new kernel rootkit.
- Mark Dowd and Alex Sotirov, “How to Impress Girls with Browser Memory Protection Bypasses”: Alex was kind enough to hook me up with a draft of their paper and they have done some awesome work. No one who does vulnerability analysis should miss Dowd and Sotirov dropping space alien technology. In fact, if you use a web browser, you should see their talk.
Anyway, if anyone is trying to hunt me down, DM me on Twitter.
