Posted by Virus Bulletin on Jul 19, 2013
We speak to VB2013 presenters Carsten Willems and Ralf Hund about their research interests and what they aim to bring to VB2013.
The VB2013 conference takes place this autumn (2-4 October) in Berlin, with an exciting programme that covers many of today's most pertinent security-related topics.
In the build-up to the event we are running a series of blogs in which we introduce the speakers and find out a bit more about their research interests and what they aim to bring to the conference.
Today we speak to Carsten Willems and Ralf Hund, who will speak at VB2013 about hardware-assisted system monitoring.
Tell us a little bit about yourself - your job and your responsibilities.
"We both work as research assistants at the Chair for Systems Security of the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany. At the chair we deal with different IT-security related topics, mostly on Windows vulnerabilities and malware research. We both finished our PhDs a few weeks ago - Ralf's on 'Analysis and Retrofitting of Security Properties for Proprietary Software Systems' and Carsten's on 'Instrumenting Existing System Components for Dynamic Analysis of Malicious Software'."
Can you give us a brief outline of what you will be speaking about at VB2013?
"We present VMMInspector, a hardware hypervisor-based analysis framework that can be used to monitor malware from the outside of a virtual machine without changing any single bit in the system. This offers practical transparency, isolation and performance and thus allows us to analyse 64-bit kernel malware on Windows 7 systems."
Why is your presentation particularly relevant to the security community?
"Contemporary malware analysis systems are often based on emulators, which are easy to detect and suffer from poor performance compared to native systems. Therefore, in our research we have worked on the instrumentation of native system components for malware analysis. In our presentation we show how hardware hypervisors can be instrumented to this end. We present the technical details of 'Two-Dimensional-Paging', which is a virtualization feature of modern micro processors. We further introduce a new form of monitoring granularity, in which we solely focus on the code flow transitions between different modules."
What other presentations are you looking forward to?
"We are looking forward to all the technical talks - but in particular Justin Kim's In-memory ROP payload detection and the CVE in-depth exploit examination.
What else are you looking forward to at VB2013?
"We are looking forward to creating new and establishing existing contacts, to seeing some cool talks, and to having fun!"
Carsten Willems and Ralf Hund will present 'Hypervisor-based, hardware-assisted system monitoring' at 11:30 on Wednesday 2 October.
The full programme for VB2013, including abstracts for each paper, can be viewed here.
Read more about why you should attend VB2013 - and download our letter templates as a guide for justifying to your budget holder why you should attend VB2013.
VB2013 takes place 2-4 October 2013 in Berlin, Germany - online registration is now open - we'd love to see you there!
Posted on 19 July 2013 by Helen Martin
