personal achievement: [h-index 5 unlocked]

recently, the google scholar feed I used to explore new work in my fields of interest was removed.

so I built my own paper discovery website:
a minimalistic design with high information density and full control over search terms.

okay deepwiki is pretty sweet.
just replace 'github' with 'deepwiki' in a repo's url and it will generate an architecture overview, explanations for components, flow diagrams etc.

I tried it on large code bases like afl++ and libafl and it's actually impressive

the guy who reversed the denuvo drm
@momo5502.bsky.social works on a high-perf windows emulator for security research.

I noticed that it supports icicle as a backend, a fuzzing-specific emulator. awesome to see academic work being continuously developed and making it into the real world

I thought USENIX was huge with like 300 accepted papers and 6 speaker tracks in parallel.
but man these ml conferences look kinda dystopian

more exciting stuff coming to libAFL @aflplusplus.bsky.social , including a binary-only ASan implementation in Rust for QEMU and integration with the unicorn emulator!

reminds me of how @dmnk.bsky.social and I got the unicornafl rust bindings up and running to fuzz some basebands 5 years ago

some convenient features coming to binja, incl. auto-classification of embedded devices based on peripheral accesses

making firmware hacking maybe a little less painful

cc @stacksmashing.bsky.social

3.7 is both in api and in cursor just utterly disappointing.
when it does what it's supposed to, it's great, but man is it trying hard to misinterpret my intentions.

beautiful and incredibly interesting talk on reverse engineering the OG xbox by
@ret2systems.bsky.social's Markus, incl. building a custom interposer to upgrade the CPU

a deep dive into hardware hacking, an ode to hw engineering and a call for software-focused researchers to try new things

I had a blast speaking and being at the RE//verse conference!

so many cool people and great discussions on firmware, fuzzing, ai and binary analysis

if you want to find out more about firmware rehosting or are an enjoyer of ascii diagrams, check out the slides to my talk below :)

today was blessed.
had a super fun day at Kennedy Space Center.

and then I got to witness my first rocket launch in person, a falcon 9 bringing Intuitive Machine's lunar lander into orbit.
my space-nerd heart is so happy.

excellent blog post on garbage collectors: "Memory Hell"

it addresses many of humanity's great questions:
- do we actually know how to do garbage collection?
- pointers, indices or handlers?
- and what are typesafe use-after-frees?

"IoT Firmware Emulation and Its Security Application in Fuzzing" is a great read to get started with rehosting firmware

it provides a taxonomy of nearly all the available approaches and discusses the most important concepts, such as peripheral modeling and fidelity trade-offs

happy new year 🎉

to continue the tradition, here is some of my favorite firmware & embedded security research of 2024:

Defeating the new Raspberry Pi's RP2350 Security Features [1]

Reversing and Hacking Firmware of an in-orbit Satellite to Re-establish Lost Communication [2]

one week left to submit to the SpaceSec NDSS workshop!

some highlights from the first two years:

A Case Study on Fuzzing Satellite Firmware [1]

Merge/Space: A Security Testbed for Satellite
Systems [2]

Death By A Thousand COTS: Disrupting Satellite Comms using Low Earth Orbit Constellations [3]

TIL about ropes

was well aware of all the problems with strings but never looked into the solution, e.g., what editors handling large files and collaborative editing use

great explanation by the @zed.dev team: zed.dev/blog/zed-dec...