Dion Blazakis

Dion Blazakis has over 15 years of experience designing, implementing, and evaluating software, systems, and devices. Dion specializes in large reverse engineering tasks, exploit development, and the design and implementation of task specific program analysis tooling. He has held positions including Software Engineer, Firmware Engineer, Principal Analyst, Director of Research and Development, and CTO. He has secure satellite cable systems, evaluated cryptographic ASICs, audited mixed hardware/software DRM systems, exploited browsers and embedded systems, and automated the extraction of iPhone application behaviors for MDM policy enforcement. Dion is best known for his award winning research related to script interpreter (ex. Javascript engines) exploitation techniques. He is also known for his work reverse engineering and documenting Apple OS exploit mitigation and isolation technologies. In 2010, he won the Pwnie award at Blackhat for "Most Innovative Research" related to his work on interpreter exploitation. In 2011, his 0-day exploit won the iPhone category of the Pwn2Own contest. Dion's research describing a software side-channel exposed via garbage collection was nominated for another Pwnie Award in 2013. Dion is also a coauthor of the "iOS Hacker's Handbook".

Appearing at:

Firmware Cartography: Charting the Course for Modern Server Compromise