So….we heard Dino & Alex and Aaron & Zef were doing some blingin new trainings. So we felt we had to keep up with the rest of the New York Krew and do one….Ok, not really. We (the two Stephens) have spent a bunch of head-down time recently doing embedded research (as we mentioned in the… [Read more…]
November 28, 2011
In July 2011, Beans gave a talk at ReCon in Montreal, CA entitled “Hardware Hacking for Software People“. This year ReCon broke away from its more humble conference venue roots, took corporate sponsorship, and upgraded the venue to a MUCH nicer hotel. (After last year’s debacles, I think Hugo and Dave decided it was just… [Read more…]
August 25, 2011
For most of my career as a software developer/security researcher I’ve romanticized ‘hardware hacking’. In my late teens and early twenties as I was learning about software development and software security I would occasionally buy Nuts and Volts from Microcenter and read Karl Lunt‘s Amateur Robotics column. Having devoured William Gibson‘s oeuvre in my late… [Read more…]
June 20, 2011
Earlier this summer Beans attended the weeklong SMT Solver Summer school held at MIT campus in Boston, Mass. Over the last few years having seen some of the presentations by Pablo Sole on DEPLIB, blogposts by Sean Heelan, and having messed around a little bit with the REIL in BinNavi we were really curious to get a… [Read more…]
June 11, 2011
This summer Beans had the honor of speaking at SummerC0n in NYC. At SummerCon 2011 we debut’d a talk on Hardware Reverse Engineering with the help of Rajendra Umadras of Intrepidus Group. (This talk was given later in the summer at Recon 2011). SummerC0n is one of the older (maybe one of the oldest) “grassroots” infosec conferences with… [Read more…]
April 27, 2011
In 2011, I (Stephen A. Ridley) don’t plan on attending too many conferences that require far away travel for many reasons. 1) My work isn’t as interesting anymore ;-( and 2) I can’t travel as easily with Sammiches. With Boston being in the northeast (close to us) we decided we’d try SourceBoston out for the… [Read more…]
February 1, 2011
I had always wondered why spam looked the way it did. Is it written by people in the third world that don’t really know English? Why does the sentence structure look kinda correct but not quite? Do people really click the links in blogspam? What is all this hubbub about SEO? In this two part… [Read more…]
November 17, 2010
Last week we here at Beans attended the first annual BlackHat Abu Dhabi to speak on software sandboxing technologies (Google Chrome) and relevant security issues. (This was the same talk from EuSecWest and ReCon.) This was the first time I (Stephen A. Ridley) had been outside of the airport in the Middle East. (The closest… [Read more…]
September 16, 2010
So let’s say that you’re sitting down to a project (perhaps a malware analysis gig, fuzzing something, or just reversing) and you realize that most of the target is implemented in COM/ActiveX Objects. What would really help you starting off on this project is a human readable version (IDL) of the TypeLib associated with the… [Read more…]
September 16, 2010
For years, I have always wanted to attend ReCon. Since about 2005 or so, I’ve read all the slides and papers that came out of ReCon. It is one of the few conferences I really ever cared to follow. This year, the first time I was able to attend, I was actually invited to speak… [Read more…]
January 12, 2012
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