reverse engineering

Chris Domas's DEF CON 23 talk on psychological warfare against reverse engineers. He builds code whose disassembly and control flow graphs mislead, intimidate and demoralize anyone analyzing it.

Michael Steil's 27c3 talk on reverse engineering the MOS 6502 from die shots into a transistor-level simulation, as in the Visual6502 project. It covers going from chip package to a digital model.

Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.

Ken Shirriff walks through how to reverse engineer integrated circuits from die photos, using famous chips as examples, in a Hackaday SuperConference talk.

Alex Ionescu's OffensiveCon 2019 keynote on how reverse engineering is done on Windows without conventional reversing. It covers legal ways to obtain names of variables, exported functions and structures.

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.

A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.

A 36C3 talk on the AMD Platform Security Processor, an undocumented ARM core inside AMD CPUs that runs before the main processor. The speakers present their reverse engineering of its internals.

A 37C3 talk on how a series of Polish electric trains stopped working after servicing by an independent company. The speakers explain how train control systems work and how they reverse-engineered the software lockouts.

Glenn Vanderburg asks whether software development can be real engineering, surveying other engineering disciplines and decades of programming experience. He envisions what a software engineering worthy of the name might look like.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference that software development is an engineering discipline, even if immature. He contends the discredited body of knowledge called software engineering has led people to wrongly reject the label.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) shows 'reverse emulation', using a Raspberry Pi in an NES cartridge to give an unmodified NES new abilities such as playing SNES games. The video starts in a strange way and gets stranger.

Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.

A 33c3 talk by marcan on reverse engineering the PS4 hardware to run Linux with 3D acceleration. It covers how the console differs from a PC and includes a story about tunneling PCIe over RS-232.

A 34C3 talk on the security architecture of the Nintendo Switch and the early progress breaking it. It introduces the Switch's custom OS and software stack, with the hackers' reverse-engineering and glitching work.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 that university-style software engineering does not work, and asks what real software engineering would look like. He revisits the waterfall model and what engineering means in other fields.

Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.

Jayson E. Street's DEF CON 19 talk shows photos from real security engagements where he was already inside client facilities, illustrating how social engineering and physical intrusion can cause huge losses. For each attack he also explains what defenses would have stopped him.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

Bruce Dang of Microsoft gives a 27C3 talk on how the Stuxnet vulnerabilities were found and analyzed. He walks through the techniques used to triage them and the details of each zero-day exploit, down to the opcode level.

Frank Abagnale, the real subject of Catch Me If You Can, speaks at Google about his life as a con man turned FBI fraud and cybersecurity expert, including advice on fraud, breaches and credit cards.

Christopher Domas presents at Black Hat 2017 how page fault analysis and processor fuzzing can exhaustively search the x86 instruction set. The talk uncovers undocumented instructions and hardware bugs and shows limits of disassemblers.

Christopher Domas presents research at DEF CON 26 showing a hidden alternate instruction set and undocumented hardware backdoor in some x86 processors, found on a third-party CPU. He uses it to ask how feasible wider hardware backdoors are.

A DEF CON 21 talk by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken on decapping chips, covering how to remove chip packaging and image the die to read out contents such as ROM.

Christopher Domas's DEF CON 26 talk on secret processor registers that vendors reserve for third parties holding trusted keys. He examines how users are locked out of parts of their own CPUs.

A 32C3 talk dissecting Red Star OS, North Korea's state-built operating system. The speakers explain its internals and how it invades users' privacy, including file watermarking.

The fail0verflow team (bushing, marcan, sven) present console hacking at 27C3, covering Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 exploits. They explain how the PS3 was cracked after Sony removed Other OS.

Christopher Domas's Black Hat talk demonstrates a hardware backdoor in a third-party x86 processor, a hidden core that grants root from userland. He uses it to discuss how feasible broader hardware backdoors might be.

The fail0verflow 27C3 talk on breaking PS3 security, covering how Sony's implementation failed, including its ECDSA mistakes.

Greg Wilson surveys what empirical research actually shows about software development, why we believe it, and how to share that knowledge more widely. It covers evidence on practices such as TDD and design patterns.

JPL's David Cummings presents at the 2025 Flight Software Workshop how the team diagnosed and fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 anomaly from billions of miles away. It walks through the flight computer and the memory fix.

Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute gives an Oxford physics talk on what exploratory engineering suggests about the Fermi paradox. He argues that von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are plausibly buildable and asks what traces advanced civilizations would leave.

Ray Kurzweil presents his book How to Create a Mind at Google, on reverse engineering the brain and using that understanding to build intelligent machines. He shows his graphs of exponential technological progress.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2016 talk on how software engineers pass knowledge down through oral tradition, from folk rhymes to programmer lore and stories like why C lacks a logical XOR. He argues for writing software with future generations in mind.

Hillel Wayne reports on interviews with 17 people who have worked as both software and traditional engineers. He argues the fields are fundamentally the same and have much to learn from each other.

John Sotos, a physician and former Intel chief medical officer, argues at DEF CON 25 that genetic diseases are exploitable vulnerabilities in the genome. He warns that CRISPR and related tools will make malicious genome hacks and targeted bioweapons feasible.

A DEF CON 23 talk showing how weak controls in electronic death registration systems let someone virtually kill a person and obtain a real death certificate, with consequences for their identity and life.

Deviant Ollam, head of a physical penetration testing team, presents tactics for getting into buildings, from bypassing door levers with a wire to defeating bank doors. He argues that physical security is often surprisingly weak.

Karla Burnett presents real phishing campaigns run against a Bay Area tech company, including conversion rates and how existing protections were bypassed. She argues for evidence-based techniques to prevent credential phishing, not just mitigate it.

Bryan Seely tells how he used fake Google Maps business listings to intercept phone calls meant for the Secret Service and FBI. He then turned himself in, and the talk explains the verification gaps that made it possible.