Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Bar discussions, Projects on September 14, 2009
We’re back! Finally I’ve found some time to write, and something to write about too! Me and Jacopo temporarily changed timezone and ocean, as we are currently working at the Security Group of California University, Santa Barbara.
Our current project is really interesting and could have far more applications than security. As it’s still in an early development phase, I will not yet delve in the details of our approach; let’s just say that we are working on a very efficient way to handle data tainting and general binary code instrumentation. As we are now getting to know very intimately the x86 machine code, we also found out that, even if a lot of opcodes are mapped in an almost sensible way, others are just scattered around in a seemingly random pattern. I guess that those were just added after the initial design, and are probably decoded by a WTF-is-this-instruction Unit. I cannot help thinking ‘How simple life would be if x86 were RISC’...’. Maybe we can still hope the Itanium stuff will come to the rescue1, but probably we are going to stick to this legacy from the 16-bit era for a long time. More on this next, I hope.
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