Organizer
Partner Company
Is Exploitation Over? Bypassing Memory Protections on Windows 7
Alexander Sotirov
Abstract
He is a regular speaker at security conferences around the world, including CanSecWest, BlackHat and Recon. Alexander is a program chair of the USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies and is one of the founders of the Pwnie Awards.
The difficulty in exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities has increased significantly with the introduction of the exploitation mitigation features in modern operating systems. The combination of GS stack cookies, SEHOP, ASLR and DEP in Windows 7 in theory prevents almost all cases of control flow modification in a vulnerable application. Vulnerabilities on Linux and the iPhone are also much more difficult to exploit than they have been at any point in the past.
Is exploitation over? This presentation will discuss the challenges facing exploit developers on hardened systems today and will outline the most promising directions for future exploitation research. I will focus not on failure of common software to opt-in into the protections, but on the future of exploitation assuming that all current protections are universally applied.
Speaker Info
Alexander Sotirov is an independent security researcher with more than ten years of experience with vulnerability research, reverse engineering and advanced exploitation techniques. His most recent work includes exploiting MD5 collisions to create a rogue Certificate Authority, bypassing the exploitation mitigations on Windows Vista and developing the Heap Feng Shui browser exploitation technique. His professional experience includes positions as a security researcher at Determina and VMware. Currently he is working as an independent security consultant in NewYork.