Binary Analysis Seminar At UC Berkeley

By Chris Wysopal

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On February 14th, Dawn Song of UC Berkeley held a seminar on binary analysis: TRUST Seminar: BitBlaze: a Binary-centric Approach to Computer Security. This seminar was open to the public.

Binary analysis is imperative for protecting COTS (common off-the-shelf) programs and analyzing and defending against the myriad of malicious code, where source code is unavailable, and the binary may even be obfuscated. Also, binary analysis provides the ground truth about program behavior since computers execute binaries (executables), not source code. In this talk, I will present the BitBlaze project, a binary-centric approach to computer security: how we can address a wide-spectrum of different security problems by analyzing program binaries and automatically extracting security related properties from them. In particular, I will describe the two central research directions of BitBlaze: (1) the design and development of the underlying BitBlaze Binary Analysis Platform, and (2) applying the BitBlaze Binary Analysis Platform to addressing real-world security problems, including automatic vulnerability signature generation, a unified framework for malware analysis, and automatic deviation detection.

Dawn Song is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley and oversees the BitBlaze binary analysis project.

By Chris Wysopal

Chris Wysopal, co-founder and CTO of Veracode, is recognized as an expert and a well-known speaker in the information security field. He has given keynotes at computer security events and has testified on Capitol Hill on the subjects of government computer security and how vulnerabilities are discovered in software. His opinions on Internet security are highly sought after and most major print and media outlets have featured stories on Mr. Wysopal and his work. At Veracode, Mr. Wysopal is responsible for the security analysis capabilities of Veracode technology.