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Frame from REcon 2013 - The Future of RE : Dynamic Binary Visualization (Christopher Domas) Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

REcon 2013 - The Future of RE : Dynamic Binary Visualization (Christopher Domas)

Sébastien Duquette
Talks
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2015–2024 score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters say it permanently changed how they think about inspecting binary data, and point to it as the origin of visual binary analysis tools.

Christopher Domas's REcon 2013 talk on dynamic binary visualization for reverse engineering. He shows how rendering binary data as interactive visual maps and trigraphs reveals structure that hex dumps hide, leading to his Cantor.dust tool.

“after having seen Christopher Domas present "The Future of RE: Dynamic Binary Visualization" my mind was forever blown.” (HN, 2017)

1 strong recommendations · 2 recommendations · 1 citations · Talks · intermediate

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@LargoLasskhyfv Jan 2017 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Unexpected Risks Found in Editing Genes to Prevent Inherited Disorders
Maybe it's a matter of tooling. I don't want to appear disrespectful, but after having seen Christopher Domas present "The Future of RE: Dynamic Binary Visualization" my mind was forever blown. Working with hexdumps, debuggers, disassemblers etc. seems so stone-agey compared to that. Like so much in IT in general. Anyways, caveman CAN more than crawl, obviously ;-) So, if you have up to an hour of time to waste, maybe you can have your mind blown to cantor dust too? [link] [this video] Something very similar seems to be developed here: [link] Happy New Cyber! edit: spelling
Dynamic binary visualization that makes hexdump-era tooling seem stone-age
@oldmanludd Nov 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: Are There Viewers for Memory Layout?
I don't think it's quite what you're looking for but cantor.dust is an interesting visualization tool for binary data. Security conference presentation from a decade ago: [this video] Release of open-source Ghidra plugin in 2020: [link]
Cantor.dust, an interesting visualization tool for binary data

Citations, criticism and jokes

@jsprogrammer Aug 2015 Cites it
on HN thread X86 rootkit
Yep. I didn't read most of the last 1/2-1/3 of the slides, but it looks like the magic number may be different for each machine (ie. there is no one binary to rule them all[all though you could probably trivially generate all possibilities])? And that there is at least some process involved in determining the number what the number is? The author is legit. Here's a somewhat recent talk he gave: [this video]
Talk by the author vouching for his credibility

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