Your computer is not yours. You may have shelled out thousands of dollars for it. It may be sitting right there on your desk. You may have carved your name deep into its side with a blowtorch and chisel. But it's still not yours. Some vendors are building secret processor registers into your system's hardware, only accessible by shadowy third parties with trusted keys. We as the end users are being intentionally locked out and left in the dark, unable to access the heart of our own processors, while select organizations are granted full control of the internals of our CPUs. In this talk, we'll demonstrate our work on how to probe for and unlock these previously invisible secret registers, to break into all-powerful features buried deep within the processor core, to finally take back our own computers.
Christopher Domas is a security researcher and embedded systems engineer, currently investigating scalable IoT security. He is best known for releasing impractical solutions to non-existent problems, including the world's first single instruction C compiler (M/o/Vfuscator), toolchains for generating images in program control flow graphs (REpsych), showing that all programs can be reduced to the same instruction stream (reductio), and the branchless DOOM meltdown mitigations. His more relevant work includes the sandsifter processor fuzzer, the binary visualization tool ..cantor.dust.., and the memory sinkhole x86 privilege escalation exploit. @xoreaxeaxeax