Why I <3 Offensive Work and Why I

Abstract:
A personal talk about my 24-year relationship with offensive security work.

Bio:
Thomas Dullien is a security researcher and entrepreneur well-known for his contributions to the theory and practice of vulnerability development and software reverse engineering. He won what was then Germany’s biggest privately financed research prize in the natural sciences in 2006 (the Horst-Goertz Prize) for work on graph-based code similarity; started and ran a company to commercialize this research that got acquired by Google, and has worked on a wide range of topics – from the very practical (turning security patches into attacks) and quite concrete (turning physics-induced DRAM bitflips into useful attacks) to the rather theoretical (attempting to clarify the theoretical foundations of exploitation). After a few years of Google Project Zero, he is now co-founder of a startup called http://optimyze.cloud that focuses on efficient computation.