Adrian Crenshaw
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2013–2026
48:39 · 59K views · Oct 3, 2012
Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.
Regarded as one of the coolest talks ever, with a futuristic binary visualization demo that has inspired later tools.
14 comments from Hacker News
You might want to have a look at Bossard's presentation from defcon20 (2012?), "Hardware backdooring is possible": [LINK] He's done a few of these, so I might be getting them mixed up -- but the message is basically that x86 (and by extension amd64) is hopelessly broken due to legacy crap that sort of hides between the cpu, ram and devices (the software running on your cdrom drive, on the network or sound card...). Also related: 4 2 1 Christopher Domas The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization this video [ed2: Skip to ~14-15 minutes to get to the good stuff, then go back and watch the whole thing :) software home page and demo download (I don't think there's anything new published): [LINK] [LINK] ed: More recent presentation, looks to be the same: [LINK] ] Again related to (but as far as I remember does not reference [edit: I was wrong, he does indeed reference this]): Black Hat USA 2010: Voyage of the Reverser: A Visual Study of Binary Species 1/5 [LINK] #HITB2013AMS D2T1 Sebastien Kaczmarek - Dreamboot - A UEFI Bootkit [LINK]
My introduction to his work was "The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization"[0] which completely blew me away. It still feels futuristic today, 13 years later. Novel UI/UX paradigms like this are slow to find widespread adoption, even when they're so clearly demonstrated to be such an ideal fit for their purpose. 0: this video
Also came up with the original ..cantor.dust.. binary visualization tool, which is a tool I never used directly but Chris' presentation of it in 2012 is still one of the coolest talks I've ever seen. [0] [LINK] [1] this video
Like CantorDust by Christopher Domas@Batelle? this video really blew my mind when I saw it. Btw. about 8 years later they finally delivered, by releasing it as plug-in for Ghidra! Yay! [LINK]
This demo does a fairly decent job of explaining how you'd use these kinds of visualizations: this video Batelle's CantorDust combines the visualization concept with a convenient UX for selecting blocks of code graphically and zooming in on the corresponding hex, or vice-versa. The "devil is in the details" with respect to the UX for these kinds of tools. The visualization or 2D image by itself is somewhat less useful without being able to snap to the corresponding part of the hex or IDA/Ghidra disassembly. I do think adding a 3rd dimension to the visualization probably adds somewhat more utility as well. The recently released open source package for CantorDust seems to omit the 3D visualizations which were shown in the demo linked here.