Browsing Archives of Author »Stephen Ridley«

Hardware Hacking for Software People

August 25, 2011

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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 […]

SMT Solvers Summerschool at MIT

June 20, 2011

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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 […]

SummerC0n 2011 retrospektiv

June 11, 2011

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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 […]

Greyhat Ruby (Source Boston)

April 27, 2011

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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 […]

Why Spam Looks Like That (Part 1): A Laymen’s peek into Natural Language Processing, Statistics, and Neural Networks

February 1, 2011

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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 […]

BlackHat Abu Dhabi 2010 (a photojournal)

November 17, 2010

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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 […]

WhoHasTlb? : Extracting TypeLib data from COM Objects

September 16, 2010

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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 […]

ReCon 2010

September 16, 2010

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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 […]

Blackhat Vegas 2010 (PhotoJournal)

September 16, 2010

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At the very last minute (partly due to some conversations on Twitter). Beans was invited to BlackHat Vegas 2010 to speak as an alternate. Having not officially applied to the CFP, it was a huge honor to be considered in this way. (Having already given the talk at Recon 2010 and Syscan helped, along with the […]

Android Scripting Layer (Encrypted SMS communication)

September 15, 2010

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Recently I (Stephen A. Ridley) have been doing quite a bit more security research on embedded systems and mobile platforms like phones. This naturally means more development in these areas. A while back I ran into SL4A or Scripting Layer for Android which was (at the time) called ASE  or Android Scripting Environment. (Apparently they […]

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