Sophia D'Antoine

Let’s automatically identify weird machines in software. Combating software exploitation has been a cat-and-mouse game ever since the Morris worm in 1988. Attackers use specific exploitation primitives to achieve unintended code execution. Major software vendors introduce exploit mitigation to break those primitives. Back and forth, back and forth. The mitigations have certainly raised the bar […]

This summer FireEye’s FLARE team hosted its second annual Flare-On Challenge targeting reverse engineers, malware analysts, and security professionals. In total, there were eleven challenges, each using different anti-reversing techniques and each in different formats. For example, challenges ranged from simple password crack-mes to kernel drivers to stego in images. This blogpost will highlight four […]

At REcon 2015, I demonstrated a new hardware side channel which targets co-located virtual machines in the cloud. This attack exploits the CPU’s pipeline as opposed to cache tiers which are often used in side channel attacks. When designing or looking for hardware based side channels – specifically in the cloud – I analyzed a […]