Podcasts Technology ISTS: Institute for Security, Technology, and Society Exploiting the hard-working DWARF

Exploiting the hard-working DWARF

Published: Jan. 29, 2011, 8 a.m.

James Oakley and Sergey Bratus of Dartmouth College spoke at Shmoocon 2011, the hacker/infosec conference in Washington, DC, on January 29, 2011. They discussed how the exception handling mechanism present in all recent GCC-compiled executables is based on the DWARF standard. It is ubiquitously used but not well understood, and contains a Turing-complete bytecode virtual machine. They showed how this bytecode can be changed to contain a Trojan payload with no native binary code.