Presentation: Control Flow Integrity Using Hardware Counters

Cody is running his team on the research side and coming up with new innovative things that we can do. He and his team came up with what we will present and some of the ideas around it and in some of the decisions we made. I am the CTO and I oversee what we're what we're building in the long run and work with Cody on strategic direction.

We understand security as a nuanced problem. In order to be effective at stopping an attacker when they're trying to perform an attack, you have to stop them very, very early. The later that you you detect them or stop them the more they kind of chip away at the trust and the privilege level and it becomes harder and harder.

How do you do that at the speed of software and the speed that their software changes these days? We found out you know after doing so some research and reading some related prior art that the CPU architecture provides some functions to do this at execution speed and that would be millions of instructions per second. So to solve this in the most effective way we we decided to tap into the hardware and that's really what the premise of the talk. We want to share how we got there and where we think we can go next.

Obviously security researchers would get a lot out of it, but there's there's a lot of people out there that do vulnerability research to think about how to see and prevent attacks or exploits.

Anyone that’s interested in malware or computer security in general I think will take some stuff away from it.

How to think about access and think a little bit outside the box about things that may historically have been just applicable to performance and development which could potentially be applicable to security as well.

What keeps me up is that for me security is a real existential problem for society; everybody on the planet. And so it keeps me up at night that we aren’t doing more and we still have a gap in the individual;s knowledge of security, and behaviors, and the security of your information. In this age, you need to protect your phone because it has your whole life on it. These kind of things keep me up because these are part engineering solutions. It's also part cultural education.