personal achievement: [h-index 5 unlocked]

📢 Excited to announce that the results on BaseBridge, our project on improving cellular baseband emulation, are going public this week. Dyon will present at IEEE S&P on Monday 3pm, while David and I will be on stage at @offensivecon.bsky.social on Saturday 11am with even more details! 1/6

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

new CCS workshop on decompilation, reversing, root cause analysis, debugging, etc. 👀

ACM SURE Workshop@sureworkshop.bsky.social · last yr.

We are excited to announce that the 1st Workshop on Software Understanding and Reverse Engineering (SURE) will be co-located at ACM CCS 2025 in Taiwan! We invite the community to submit their awesome research sure-workshop.org/. So, what is SURE? More in the 🧵

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

ICLR Conference@iclr-conf.bsky.social · last yr.

The calm before the storm #ICLR2025 🔥🔥🔥

the recording of my talk "Rethinking Emulation for Fu(zzi)n(g) and Profit: Near-Native Rehosting for Embedded ARM Firmware" is online! I had an absolute blast speaking and being at @re-verse.io, so many great talks and hallway discussions

RE//verse@re-verse.io · last yr.

We were slow with the last video update so we figured we'd do a two for one! Lukas talks about rehosting firmware for fuzzing (youtu.be/o_ckTnTQlfs) and Robin shows off a fantastic new tool for exploring code relationships beyond single binaries (www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsDn...)

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

Binary Ninja@binary.ninja · last yr.

We've been teasing it for a while, but the full features of Firmware Ninja are officially available on dev and will be in the 5.0 release later this month! Doing reverse engineering of embedded firmware? Check out how FWN can make your life better:

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

RE//verse@re-verse.io · last yr.

Our first video from RE//verse 2025 is live! Part journey of personal discovery, part technical deep-dive, this presentation from Markus Gaasedelen was the highest rated in the feedback survey and is a must-see talk:

libAFL is a beast. it has so many settings to tweak, different modes to select and the code can be quite scary at first. but writing a target-specific custom fuzzer is super powerful! to get started, Trail of Bits just published a nice primer: appsec.guide/docs/fuzzing...

my google scholar's 'recommended articles' feed has been empty for weeks. where is, it I miss it :/ anyone any recommendation for an alternative? some tunable feed of recent papers?

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?

AapoAlas@aapoalas.trynova.dev · last yr.

Your slides ended up inspiring me to write a veritable treatise of a blog post on how implementing garbage collection in a memory / type safe engine can, is, and ought to be done. It's a bit of a ramble, maybe, but also a direct response to your excellent questions <3 trynova.dev/blog/memory-...

2024 was a significant year for decompilation, constituting a possible resurgence in the field. Major talks, the thirty-year anniversary of research, movements in AI, and an all-time high for top publications in decompilation. Join me for a retrospective: mahaloz.re/dec-progr...

Decompiling 2024: A Year of Resurgance in Decompilation Research

The year 2024 was a resurgant year for decompilation. Academic publications from that year made up nearly 30% of all top publications ever made in decompilat...

mahaloz.re

Rehost embedded ARM firmware at near-native speeds! Lukas Seidel @pr0me.bsky.social introduces SAFIREFUZZ, achieving 690x fuzzing throughput with ARM Cortex-M firmware. Dive into instruction rewriting, emulation, and performance gains. https://re-verse.sessionize.com/session/784004 #REverse2025

"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

Hooked on computer security, adversarial learning, or even both? 🤩 The BIFOLD Graduate School has 10 open PhD positions! Join us in vibrant Berlin to work with top-notch researchers on machine learning, data management, and, of course, security! 🔗 mlsec.org/jobs.html#jobs

RULECOMPILE - Undocumented Ghidra decompiler rule language. A blog post about how frustration with poor decompilation led me to dive deep into Ghidra's decompiler to discover (and reverse-engineer) - an obscure, undocumented DSL msm.lt/re/ghidra/ru... #reverseengineering #ghidra

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]

2024 is almost done, so here’s a thread on my 5 favorite fuzzing papers published this year. In no particular order…🧵

recovering a satellite by creatively using existing telecommands and overwriting vtables to persistently add new commands without needing to touch (and risk breaking) the running OBC firmware. also, because that firmware didn't have an update mechanism incredible talk! media.ccc.de/v/38c3-hacki...

Hacking yourself a satellite - recovering BEESAT-1

In 2013, the satellite BEESAT-1 started returning invalid telemetry, rendering it effectively unusable. Because it is projected to remain...

media.ccc.de

My videos for Flare-On 2024 are live! Watch me reverse engineer all the challenges from start to end. 🎉🥳 + Commentary video featuring SuperFashi, where we review the chals together. * 45 hours of content * 400+ GB of raw footage Merry Christmas! Link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwW9...

Flare-On 2024 Solutions and Commentary

YouTube video by BasteG0d69

youtube.com

In case you missed it from #LABScon24: BINARLY’s @matrosov.bsky.social and @pagabuc.bsky.social reveal their research into a firmware supply-chain security issue that affected major device vendors and hundreds of models, PKfail. 📺 Watch the full video: s1.ai/PKfail

Is your GPU trustworthy? 🤔 Today, Julian presents our work on implanting machine learning backdoors in hardware at @acsacconf.bsky.social. Our backdoors reside within a hardware ML accelerator, manipulating models on-the-fly and invisible from outside. mlsec.org/docs/2024-ac... 1/3

The yearly academic security circus concludes. Exponential growth continues with 1146 published papers (vs 947 in '23 and 93 in '05). Essentially, we published 14% of all security papers this year. Two authors cracked 100 papers and 13 published >=10 this year. Details: nebelwelt.net/pubstats/top...

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]