REcon 2013 - The Future of RE : Dynamic Binary Visualization (Christopher Domas)
Why Hacker News recommends it
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.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2015 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec LargoLasskhyfv · 2017-01 · on “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
Recommends oldmanludd · 2023-11 · on “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]
Recommends hoosieree · 2024-09 · on “Show HN: Bin-graph: Visualize binary files”
Have you checked out this demo? [this video] The 3d pan/tilt/zoom visualizations of the trigraphs are especially nice to look at.
Cites jsprogrammer · 2015-08 · on “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]