USENIX Enigma 2016 - What Makes Software Exploitation Hard?

Ben Hawkes discusses the technologies and defensive trends that make modern vulnerability discovery and exploitation increasingly difficult.

Ben Hawkes, Google Project Zero has a simple mission—"make 0day hard." To achieve this goal we use our own attack research to improve software and design new defenses. This talk describes some of the technologies and trends that Project Zero researchers have recently encountered that in our view have made vulnerability discovery and exploitation fundamentally harder. Ben Hawkes is a founding member and the current manager of Google's "Project Zero" security research team. As a researcher, Ben has discovered dozens of serious vulnerabilities across a number of different software platforms (including Android, Linux, and Windows). He has regularly presented and published research focused on vulnerability analysis and software exploitation, such as novel heap exploitation techniques on Windows. Prior to Project Zero, Ben worked for four years on the security of Google's product launches, with a particular interest in virtualization and sandboxing. Sign up to find out more about Enigma conferences: usenix.org/conference/eni... Watch all Enigma 2016 videos at: enigma.usenix.org/youtube