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This article series will be a summary of about a decade of unpublished research I am trying to organize and share. Not all of it is current, as newer hardware is harder to inspect and reverse. However, much of it is still relevant. The first post below is an introduction

A couple of years ago I participated in a red-team exercise with a company involved in hardware R&D. The company had a very strict password policy, and every computer had a randomized local adminsitrator account password and local SMB server disabled. We managed to gain access to one

This blog post is an in-depth dive into the security features of the Intel/Windows platform boot process. In this post I’ll explain the startup process through security focused lenses, next post we’ll dive into several known attacks and how there were handled by Intel and Microsoft. My

A while ago, I’ve been working on a very large codebase that consisted of a few million lines of code. Large systems are usually a big mess and this one was no exception. Since this is a rather common problem in software engineering, I thought the internet would be

Proof of concept …for a C# binary that When executed… * Executes an encrypted payload in memory without drops (In this example, the payload just displays a MessageBox) * All variable names are obfuscated using unreadable characters * All strings are runtime encrypted with a simple 8-bit xor * Very hard to analyze when

I love when my current problem can be solved with a state machine. They’re fun to design and implement, and I have high confidence about correctness. They tend to: 1. Present minimal, tidy interfaces 2. Require few, fixed resources 3. Hold no opinions about input and output 4. Have

In his classic paper How to Build a Highly Available System Using Consensus Butler Lampson laid out a pattern that’s become very popular in the design of large-scale highly-available systems. Consensus is used to deal with unusual situations like host failures (Lampson says reserved for emergencies), and leases (time-limited