Xeno Kovah

Xeno Kovah is a Lead InfoSec Engineer at The MITRE Corporation, a non-profit company that runs 6 federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) as well as manages CVE. He is the team lead for the BIOS Analysis for Detection of Advanced System Subversion project. On the predecessor project, Checkmate, he investigated kernel/userspace memory integrity verification & timing-based attestation. Both projects have a special emphasis on how to make it so that the measurement agent can't just be made to lie by an attacker. Xeno is also the founder and leading contributor to OpenSecurityTraining.info. twitter: @xenokovah Special thanks to the contributing researchers for their help in co-authoring: John Butterworth is a security researcher at The MITRE Corporation who currently specializes in Intel firmware security. In 2012 he co-authored the whitepaper "New Results for Timing-Based Attestation" which used timing based attestation to detect Windows kernel hooks. This research was presented at DEF CON and the 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Policy. In 2013 he and his colleagues authored "BIOS Chronomancy:Fixing the Static Root of Trust for Measurement" which proposed using Timing-Based Attestation during the BIOS boot process to resolve critical problems which they had found with current implementations of the Trusted Computing Group's "Static Root of Trust for Measurement". He has presented this research at NoSuchCon, Black Hat USA, SecTor, SEC-T, Breakpoint, and Ruxcon. Following this he has created a tool called Copernicus designed to determine just how prevalent vulnerable BIOS is in industry. John is currently continuing to research the security of BIOS/UEFI and the Intel architecture. Sam Cornwell is a Sr. InfoSec Engineer at The MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit company that runs 6 federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) as well as manages CVE. Since 2011 he has been working on projects such as Checkmate (a kernel and userspace memory integrity verification & timing-based attestation tool), Copernicus, a (BIOS extractor and configuration checker), and several other private security sensors designed to combat sophisticated threats. He has also researched and developed attacks against UEFI SecureBoot.

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