This talk will clarify different aspects of a modern computer architecture, with emphasis in the Intel-based platforms, but with an open-mindset. It will define the threats that exist, processes in place, new (and upcoming) security features and pinpoint difficulties protecting computer networks. As usual, Rodrigo will also face the FUD around misplaced news explaining hardware-based backdoors, their power and easy to spot and proposing ways for companies to protect Virtualized environments and avoid supply chain hijacks (all the NSA-related jokes will be part of the talk and not of the Abstract since Rodrigo is currently living in US). If you don’t know a lot about your computer and how it works, this talk is for you. If you do, this talk will challenge your knowledge and hopefully will have one (or five) things you didn’t knew before.
Rodrigo Rubira Branco (BSDaemon) works as Principal Security Researcher at Intel Corporation and is the Founder of the Dissect || PE Malware Analysis Project. Held positions as Director of Vulnerability & Malware Research at Qualys and as Chief Security Research at Check Point where he founded the Vulnerability Discovery Team (VDT) and released dozens of vulnerabilities in many important software. In 2011 he was honored as one of the top contributors to Adobe Vulnerabilities in the past 12 months. Previous to that, he worked as Senior Vulnerability Researcher in COSEINC, as Principal Security Researcher at Scanit and as Staff Software Engineer in the IBM Advanced Linux Response Team (ALRT) also working in the IBM Toolchain (Debugging) Team for PowerPC Architecture. He is a member of the RISE Security Group and is the organizer of Hackers to Hackers Conference (H2HC), the oldest and biggest security research conference in Latin America. He is an active contributor to open-source projects (like ebizzy, linux kernel, others). Accepted speaker in lots of security and open-source related events as H2HC, Black Hat, Hack in The Box, XCon, VNSecurity, OLS, Defcon, Hackito, Ekoparty, Troopers and others.