Yes, I survived the Recon 2010 hotel fire. It was held in Montreal from July 9th to the 11th at a supposedly posh hotel where the air-conditioning wasn't working at all building-wide during a heat wave. Imagine 200 sweaty dudes in a room full of laptops and projectors. As always, it was one of the most interesting reverse-engineering conferences of the year, covering most aspects of reversing ranging from hardware hacking to automated exploit generation to malware analysis. No vendors, no booths, just people that love reverse-engineering.
Like most people, I missed some of the presentations in part or totally because of the unbearable heat in the conference room but no fear, all the presentations were recorded and will be posted online shortly by the organizers. Training was given before and after the conference by Rolf Rolles, Gerardo 'gera' Richarte, Alex Ionescu and Tomislav Pericin and a lockpicking training session was given during lunch hour by Deviant Ollam.
Here is a list of the speakers:
Pierre-Marc Bureau and Joan Calvet - Understanding Swizzor's Obfuscation Scheme
Stephan Chenette - Using Fireshark to Analyze Malicious Websites (20 minutes)
Ero Carrera and Jose Duart - Packer Genetics: The Selfish Code
Gynvael Coldwind and Unavowed - Syndicate Wars Port: How to port a DOS game to modern systems
Dino Dai Zovi - Mac OS X Return-Oriented Exploitation
Nicolas Falliere - Reversing Trojan.Mebroot's Obfuscation
Yoann Guillot and Alexandre Gazet - Metasm Feelings (30 minutes)
Travis Goodspeed - Building hardware for exploring deeply embedded systems
Sean Heelan - Applying Taint Analysis and Theorem Proving to Exploit Development
Alex Ionescu - Debugger-based Target-to-Host Cross-System Attacks
Ricky Lawshae - Picking Electronic Locks Using TCP Sequence Prediction (20 minutes)
Assaf Nativ - Memory analysis - Looking into the eye of the bits
Danny Quist - Reverse Engineering with Hypervisors
Deviant Ollam - Finding Chinks in the Armor - Reverse-Engineering Locks
Sebastian Porst - How to really obfuscate your malware PDF files
Jason Cheatham and Jason Raber - Reverse Engineering with Hardware Debuggers (20 minutes)
Stephen Ridley - Escaping the Sandbox
Igor Skochinsky - Intro to Embedded Reverse Engineering for PC reversers
Michael Sokolov - SDSL reverse engineering
Jonathan Stuart - DMS, 5ESS and Datakit VCS II: interfaces and internals
William Whistler - Reversing, better
Georg Wicherski - dirtbox, a highly scalable x86/Windows Emulator
Sebastian Wilhelm Graf - Rainbow tables re-implemented
The most memorable ones that I have seen included the hardware hacking presentation by Travis Goodspeed, who designed the Hope 2010 badge, Dino Dai Zovi, who got me interested again in Mac OS X reversing, Sean Heelan and William Whistler, who both talked about new ways to look at assembly code, Danny Quist, who gave a presentation very similar to mine from the last edition of Recon, Michael Sokolov and Jonathan Stuart, who gave an improvised talk together about VAX/VMS, Pierre-Marc Bureau and Joan Calvet, who talked about very interesting malware that seemed oddly familiar to me and finally, Sebastian Wilhelm Graf, for his use of lolcats and lolgroundhogs.
The organizers held dinners or parties every night and took everybody through a "pub crawl", a tour of some of the local bars like Tokyo, Saphir and Cafe Campus. The conference was coincidentally located next to the club district so everything was within walking distance. They even had a show by a nerdcore rapper called Dual Core.
Some icons of the online reverse-engineering community were sorely missed: Mammon, Woodmann, Zero and Fravia (who is now sitting next to +ORC in heaven). I learned reversing from the descendants of the legendary +HCU, who started the first online reverse-engineering community to promote the free sharing of information and tutorials. Reversing for fun led me to malware analysis then to the security field. I am not an academic; I am a product of the internet community who managed to make it in the corporate world, thanks to these guys.
Recon follows the same train of thought, the free sharing of information and knowledge. All the speakers are the top experts of their own field, all related to reverse-engineering or security in general (except the speed talk about HPV, wrong kind of virus maybe?). The new techniques showed and explained in great details allow us to do a better job by working more efficiently. The fields of automated exploit generation and taint analysis could really speed up implementing vulnerability detection, especially on Patch-Tuesdays, where we are bound to our customers by a 24h SLA. We also sometimes do malware detection when there is enough demand for it so all those new analysis techniques will definitely help speed up the coverage development, especially when there are many variants to cover. Finding new ways to automate repetitive tasks always sounds good to me. Some companies might not see a value or ROI in going to Recon since it is not a commercial conference but it was definitely worth it.
All in all, I can't wait for the next edition of Recon, which hopefully will be held in a different hotel but it doesn't really matter as the important thing was meeting all these interesting people.
BTW I met Tavis there. Even though there is a disagreement between him and nCircle, he is a really great guy when talking over a beer. Politics had no place at Recon, that's one of the many things that makes it so special.
