Ruxcon 2012

Wow! This years Ruxcon, hacker/tech conference, was great! There was a great line-up of talks, and plenty of things to do (CTF, hanging out, parties, lock picking). I was on the staff, and did just a minor bit of writing for the handbook, Saturday party organizing, and some MCing... Yes, they let me near the mic. Anyways, I had a blast! One of the greatest things of Melbourne... this con!

-Matt

San Francisco Pics

Well, I am now back in Melbourne. Man, my trip to San Francisco, and then to home in VA, was great. It was nice to catch-up with friends and family. Anyways, after tons of flying, and getting two pat-downs (yes, I denied being scanned by some of the new scanners at the airport), I am back. Sure, the TSA peeps told me that the scanners were "radio wave" based. Well, radio waves are safe and do not produce ionizing radiation. But, in principle, I just denied the scan. So I got the love-touch from the TSA dudes. And yes, the pat-down is a slow process, I wonder if this is intentional, as to convince people to go through the scanners. Anyways, pics, not of the pat-downs, are here.

-Matt

Satanic Canaries and Binary Runtime Hardening

A while back I started writing some stack canaries to play with GCC RTL. Anyways, this exercise resulted in Satanic Canary, a series of stack canaries implemented as a GCC-plugin. This software can be obtained here. With that said, I also wrote an article talking more in depth on this topic. Linux Journal just published it in their October 2012 edition.

-Matt

San Frangoatpenis

Wow. It has been a helluva week. My manager and myself rocked the Plugfest at ISPCS and then we presented two papers, one a piece. The papers went well, but the test-lab/demo/plugfest was pretty stressful. Lots of coffee consumed. Ultimately, I had a blast.

Anyways, I went to Haight Ashbury today, and let me just say. I know I might look a bit stoner like, but I could not tell you how many people were so generous to offer me some of their medical plant material. I turned them down, even though I am vegan and appreciate plants. I also went to the Amoeba store, per recommendation of my manager. Amazing record store... best one ever! FRIKKIN' HUGE METAL SECTION. It as if the pit of Satan's anus ruptured open, and the contents spilled out upon the back wall of their lovely store. I love Haight Ashbury. Oh, and I met a dude there who recommended a Brazilian band to me Goat Penis. And this dude also rocks this website: http://www.metalifestyle.com. Afterwards, I walked to the park at the end of Haight and chilled there for a bit. Laid on the grass, hungout.

-Matt

Ruxcon 2011 Video

Hey faithful readers. All two of you. The videos from last years Ruxcon conference in Melbourne are now live here. My talk on GCC plugins and malware techniques is here.

-Matt

ISPCS and Wing Flapping

Ok yeahhhhhh. So umm, my research has been pretty craptastic, in my opinion. I haven't cured cancer, proven that P!=NP, or found a solution to the halting problem. Ultimately, I have been pretty worried that my research isn't quite novel enough for a PhD. Well, I mean, it is somewhat neat but I can't say we have anything ground breaking. But that's research.... so I tell myself.

On the other front, some of the stuff at work, primarily our research in the high precision timing stuff, has landed two papers at the 2012 International Symposium on Precision Clock Synchronization (ISPCS). While I don't think I wrote much if any for the papers, I am cited as an author on both. I suppose my work-research, or being on the team, landed my name in the papers. And this means... trip to San Frantabulous Sisco! So, after SanFran, and some other stuffs, I plan on heading to Virginia to meet up with family, friends, and the scary right-wing republicoast for a bit of a break. Oh! And maybe catch some mad Peanut Fest action. Neeeee nenenennnenen Hawwwwww! Sooooo... if you read this... and want to be graced by the sexxyness (me... duh!) then drop me an email. I need to hangout with friends!

-Matt

Rawr!

So I was tossing around some ideas with one of my advisers, +Peter Schachte, and I realized: There is no programming language, that I am aware of, which has built-in versioning primitives/keywords. Personally, I think extending a language to reflect the concept of a specific version of the program, or source file, can be a useful feature. Versions help track bugs, aid application development, and can enforce security. Such a language feature could make use of certain library functionality or even use a specific version of a library based on language keywords or primitives decorating the source code. Peter is full of good ideas, and brain storming with him is quite valuable. Anyways, back to the point, extending a language to add these sprinkles is not always a trivial task. How would others make use of such features, unless compilers were built/modified to address such added functionality (rhetorical question... no question mark will follow). Anyways, what can be done; however, is use a plugin-capable compiler, and write a plugin to bolt-on such features.

Well, I did not target this concept fully, but it led me to what I thought was a decent idea. A GCC compiler plugin which automatically adds a version and timestamp to any file being compiled. This data can be extracted by looking at the binary file's read-only data section, '.rodata.' Such a plugin is simple to use: just add the proper gcc flag `-fplugin=identisaurus.so' and blammo, it's done. This, folks, is the birth of the identisaurus. You can obtain this bad boy here:
http://github.com/enferex/identisaurus/.
*RAWR!*

-Matt