Here are the talks and workshops our CFP panel have selected for 44CON 2026 (more are to be announced). The schedule is available here.
Talks
GoGra is an interesting backdoor family which emerged in 2024, mostly targeting India and Afghanistan.
In April 2026, its developers released a Linux variant with several smart mechanisms: an implant hidden in the dropper ELF binary, abuse of the Microsoft Graph API as an email-based dead-drop C2.
In this talk, we detail the interesting functionalities of GoGra (e.g how the implant is hidden, how emails are encrypted), but also how we performed the reverse engineering. Indeed, as the name suggests, GoGra is implemented in Go.
Malware analysis of stripped Go binaries is known to be painful: numerous unnamed functions, presence of runtime and library code, wrappers, specific ABI conventions which confuse disassemblers etc.
Consequently, we assisted our reverse engineering with AI, with a setup of OpenCode, Ghidra MCP and specific agents and skills. The good (?) news is that this is not a “single-click analysis” where the AI does all the work and we just sit and look. We have to guide LLMs to answer our questions. For example, I provided a “crash course” at reversing Go to the LLM, and working from that it was able to generate a useful Ghidra script to parse the pclntab (this is a table which maps instruction addresses to function names).
The talk continues with a workshop on “Reverse engineering with AI”, where the audience learns how to setup binary disassembly with AI. The workshop consists of a collection of CrackMe or CTF binaries to reverse.
Participants learn to setup OpenCode, MCPs for Ghidra and Radare2. They experience with permissions, creation of agents and skills for reverse engineering. The workshop is tailored to be used with free API keys from various providers. The results are even better if participants can afford a paid subscription, but it is not mandatory.
Axelle Apvrille is a Principal Security Researcher at Fortinet, Fortiguard Labs. Her research interests are mobile and IoT malware that she reverses every day (with, or without AI). In addition, she is the founder of Ph0wn, an on-site Capture The Flag (CTF) competition which focuses on ethical hacking of smart objects. She also plays CTFs, mostly for fun, but with a few recent podiums.
Axelle has spoken at many conferences such as Black Hat Europe, Virus Bulletin, BlackAlps, BruCON, Hack.Lu, NorthSec, Nullcon, r2con, RSA Europe, Troopers… She published in Phrack #71 and in several PagedOut e-Zines. She has also published in academic journals such as IEEE Security & Privacy, or Journal in Computer Virology.
In a prior life, Axelle used to implement cryptographic algorithms and security protocols. This is where her handle “Cryptax” comes from.
MCP SDKs have moved fast. They were adopted widely and rapidly – and quietly became the trusted identity brokers inside build systems, CI pipelines, and release automation.
And that inherent trust is rarely questioned.
Until it’s abused.
In this talk we’ll present a real world attack path against Anthropic’s AI Model Context Protocol SDK where default OAuth and browser security assumptions enable silent developer token theft. No memory corruption. No zero day. Just permissive configuration choices that turn convenience into a supply chain primitive.
By abusing cross origin OAuth endpoints and unvalidated redirect handling, a malicious website can steal a fully privileged developer token from a logged in engineer with a single page visit. From there, the attacker gains access to source repositories, CI pipelines, and automated signing workflows that treat the stolen identity as legitimate.
The result is a clean supply chain compromise. Malicious code is committed, built, signed, and distributed through trusted update channels without triggering traditional security controls. And the irony is – everything works exactly as designed.
This session walks through the full exploit chain from browser based token exfiltration to signed artifact distribution. It connects modern AI tooling, agent driven automation, and OAuth trust boundaries into a single attack surface that many organizations are already running in production.
‘I am a Director of Engineering at Cato Networks, where I focus on building high-performing engineering teams and leveraging AI to create new product capabilities and engineering initiatives.
I’m passionate about the intersection of Security, AI, and Engineering, and recently established Cato’s Engineering AI Hub in London to expand our engineering presence in the UK.
I enjoy turning emerging technologies into practical solutions that empower engineers, accelerate innovation, and deliver meaningful impact.
This talk takes attendees inside the first 24 hours of a recent ransomware incident affecting a multinational factory environment. Rather than presenting a generic ransomware checklist, it follows an anonymized real response: what was discovered first, what decisions had to be made under pressure, what could not be trusted, and how recovery was planned without creating a second compromise. This talk is based on a real ransomware incident that I personally responded to, with all client-identifying details anonymized.
The session walks through the responder workflow from initial triage to early recovery: understanding production impact, preserving evidence, scoping identity and infrastructure compromise, containing attacker access, validating backups, deciding what systems to restore first, and communicating recovery options to leadership.
The talk focuses on practical lessons from live ransomware response, including mistakes that commonly increase downtime: premature shutdowns, incomplete identity containment, restoring from unvalidated backups, overlooking remote access tooling, and bringing systems online before trust has been rebuilt.
A short hands-on defensive demo will show how the case study methodology can be applied to a simulated ransomware recovery scenario, including backup trust assessment, clean-room restore planning, and post-restore compromise checks.
Attendees will leave with a practical first-day ransomware response and recovery framework they can adapt to their own environments.
Johnny is an international ransomware responder and cybersecurity professional specializing in incident response, ransomware recovery, and strategic security recommendations. Holding CISSP, OSCE3, and eCTHP certifications, he has supported organizations through the full ransomware lifecycle, from initial incident response and containment to recovery planning and post-incident hardening.
He is also an active security researcher with a strong interest in threat research, offensive security, and cyber resilience, with several research papers published in the field.
Cyber teams are right to be cautious about agentic AI tools. But the larger risk may be that it becomes too slow for an AI-native software world. Using The Wrong Trousers as a metaphor for delegated control – the human is inside the machine, but not necessarily steering it – this talk explores how we supervise AI security agents without approving every step. I’ll cover practical research into local agent workflows for threat modelling, vulnerability triage and remediation, balancing auditability, rollback and human judgement.
Chris Cooper is a Product Security Director with 15 years in pentesting, application security and security leadership. He works on Product Security at News Corp – a global media enterprise covering a large portfolio of direct-to-consumer applications across multiple brands.
He has previously managed AppSec at Sage and led a cybersecurity consultancy practice. Chris is a contributing author to OWASP SAMM v2, a STEM Ambassador, and the founder of OWASP Hack Heroes, a project helping young people learn cyber skills.
Most defences for agents sit at the edges: input filters, guardrails, output classifiers, system prompts hardened against the last jailbreak someone posted on Discord. Nobody is watching what the agent is actually thinking.
OpenAI and DeepMind set out to test this. Their thesis: monitoring an agent’s chain of thought catches misbehaviour that monitoring its actions (tool calls, API usage, etc.) alone cannot. When you watch what an agent is thinking rather than just what it does, a whole category of nuanced compromise becomes visible: indirect prompt injection, tool poisoning, goal drift, subtle exfiltration patterns dressed up as legitimate tool use. Their thesis was right – the research found that it improve detection accuracy by 35% and was 4x more likely to catch nuanced attacks.
Max Corbridge, ethical hacker and red teamer, turned that research into the first open-source runtime security monitoring system for agents, watching not just what an agent does but what it’s reasoning about while it does it. This talk covers the attack surface, what edge defences miss, and includes live demos of Adrian (the OSS detection system https://github.com/secureagentics/Adrian) catching and stopping real attacks against production agents.
Max spent 6 years as an ethical hacker, working with some of the largest organisations and governments on the planet. After seeing how organisations were rapidly adopting an insecure technology in AI agents, combined with a research paper from OpenAI & Deepmind exploring a novel approach to monitoring AI systems, he quit his job and started building the first open-source runtime security toolkit in the industry. He is a regular speaker on BBC News on the topic of AI security.
When assessing the cryptographic security of algorithms, we tend to use the description provided by the author.
However it is not the only possible description and there as a few cases where the official description of an encryption algorithm was not the most suitable one and served in reality to hide some weaknesses actually.
Based on former experience and anlyses, this talk propose a new approach in cryptanalysis based on an evolution of the concept of Combinatorial Equivalence. The aim is to rewrite a cryptosystem under a combinatorially equivalent form in order to make appear new properties that are more strongly discriminating the
secret key used during encryption.
We successfully applied this approach to the most secure stream ciphers category nowadays but also on block ciphers.
We first define a concept cipher called Cipherbent6 that capture most of the difficulty of stream cipher cryptanalysis.
We significantly outperformed all known cryptanalysis. We applied this approach to the Achterbahn cipher and we obtained again far better cryptanalysis results. Finally when applying this approach to the most critical cryptographic primitives of block ciphers we have found such stronger biases that the original algorithm description did not expose.
Éric Filiol is a senior expert in information and systems security, data security, cyber security and intelligence at Thales Group, Paris. He is also acting as Head of Research & Development for Hope4Sec, in Tallinn Estonia.
He has been professor at various engineer schools and universities in the field of information and systems security until recently. In the last three years he has been in charge of risk and threat assessment, security certification (restricted EU, NATO, Export Control level) of a restricted private cloud in the Defense sector. He directed the research and the cyber security laboratory of a French engineer school for 12 years.
He spent 22 years in the French Army (Infantry/French Marine Corps). He holds an engineering degree in Cryptology, a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Ecole Polytechnique and a Habilitation to Conduct Research (HDR) in Information from the University of Rennes. He holds several NATO certifications in the field of intelligence. He is still deeply involved in R&D (mathematics, programming, code security, information security).
He is editor-in-chief of the research journal in Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques published by Springer.
He regularly gives international conferences in the field of security (Black Hat, CCC, CanSecWest, PacSec, Hack.lu, Brucon, H2HC, Hacktivity, BSides, 44CON…).
Jaagup Sepp graduated in Mathematics from Bauman Moscow State Technical University (MGU). He is a senior R&D expert in Information security for Hope4Sec in Tallinn since 2019.
His areas of expertise are
- Discrete Mathematics & Combinatorics applied to Information security.
- Cryptanalysis of Symmetric encryption systems.
- Security of Machine Learning, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.
Jaagup is particularly committed to the values of freedom, privacy, and respect for human and democratic values. These values guide all of his research activities.
Digital assistants are no longer just tools. They are becoming trusted intermediaries, assisting us with everyday decisions and acting on our behalf. That trust is exactly what makes them dangerous – every interaction with our digital assistants, every task we delegate, creates a bridge an attacker can exploit. Attackers no longer need to reach their victims directly: the digital assistant becomes the intermediary, a familiar interface turned into a channel for manipulation, control, and harm. Digital assistants can speak naturally, respond empathetically, and craft personalised, context-aware attacks on demand. And they can act autonomously across connected apps and services, amplifying the consequences of a single user approval far beyond what the victim ever anticipated.
This talk introduces DAMSE (Digital Assistant-Mediated Social Engineering), the first framework to measure social engineering risk based on what a digital assistant can do. Conversational capabilities determine how likely a digital assistant is to successfully manipulate the user, while its agentic capabilities determine the impact of the attack once manipulation succeeds. By evaluating these two sets of capabilities together, DAMSE identifies the risk each assistant poses and which capabilities drive that risk.
We apply DAMSE to digital assistants like Alexa+ and OpenClaw, revealing that the most persuasive assistant is not always the most dangerous. We also show that risk can shift dramatically with user behaviour and system configuration alone, even without any technological change. We finally demonstrate that, because the assistant mediates the attack, raising user awareness alone is no longer sufficient: providers must also act on the digital assistant itself – shaping its conversational capabilities to limit the assistant’s ability to manipulate, and limiting its agentic capabilities to ensure that, even if a user is deceived, the damage remains bounded. DAMSE translates these insights into action: it tells defenders which capabilities to prioritise, and by how much.
Salvatore Gariuolo, Ph.D. is a Senior Threat Researcher with the Forward-looking Threat Research (FTR) team at TrendAI. His work focuses on emerging cybersecurity threats – from connected vehicles to generative AI and agentic systems. With nearly a decade of research experience in both industry and academia, he investigates how new technologies reshape the threat landscape before the industry is ready to defend against it.
Modern Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions live and die by kernel callbacks like PsSetCreateProcessNotifyRoutine. Windows kernel actively defends these critical APIs. If you attempt to register a callback from an unbacked driver, the kernel blocks the request with STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED, utilizing MmVerifyCallbackFunctionCheckFlags to validate the caller’s legitimacy.
This talk introduces a novel, post-exploitation Direct Kernel Object Manipulation (DKOM) technique that completely bypasses these internal caller validations.
We will dive deep into the Windows memory manager to expose the undocumented mechanics behind MiLockLoadedDataTableEntry and MmFindDataTableEntryByAddress. Crucially, we will reveal the structure of a completely undocumented AVL tree (assumed to be MmLoadedModuleTree) which lacks PDB documentation and hides as anonymous QWORDs in memory. By reverse-engineering the nodes of this tree, we can successfully bridge the gap of undocumented kernel data and manually satisfy the OS’s caller checks.
The result is the ability to subscribe an unbacked, manually mapped driver to process creation and termination callbacks without compromising the OS security posture. This technique operates cleanly on fully patched Windows 11 systems with all modern mitigations including Hypervisor-Enforced Code Integrity (HVCI) and Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) fully enabled. Attendees will see exactly how to turn a manually mapped driver into an invisible interceptor.
Documentation can be found at- https://arth.imbeddex.com/Kernel_stuff/Windows/Kernel%20Callback%20Integrity%20Bypass/
Hi, I am Arth Maurya, a Security Researcher specializing in Reverse Engineering, Adversary Simulation, Penetration Testing, and RF Hacking.
My research focuses on deeply understanding operating system internals to test the limits of modern security infrastructure. To do this, I develop custom offensive security tools, scripts, and protocols entirely from scratch, relying on minimal dependencies and writing low level code in C, C++, and x64 Assembly.
All of my research and custom tool sets are open source and well documented. Feel free to check out my code and projects:
https://arth.imbeddex.com/
https://github.com/Oorth
One of the attractions of Kubernetes is being able to save money on cloud bills, and what better way to save money that running everything in one massive cluster with all our different teams (or customers) deploying their applications in one place! Unfortunately once we’ve got our cluster set-up we might end up singing the multi-tenant blues as it can be a bit tricky to isolate our workloads properly.
We’re going to talk about the different layers that make up a Kubernetes cluster and how the stack of different projects and re-use of older Linux primitives makes good multi-tenant security hard to achieve. We’ll also look at some of the risks of breakout from containers down to shared cluster nodes, how the Kubernetes authorization system has edge cases that can allow for privilege escalation and why the networking model implemented by Kubernetes does not lend itself to scenarios where hostile tenants are present, especially as Kubernetes is SSRF as a service!
We’ll also look at a high-level at how these problems can be solved and the trade-offs of different approaches to improving multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster security, so that attendees can make informed decisions on where they want to place the security boundaries in their Kubernetes environments.
Rory has worked in the cyber security arena for the last 26 years in a variety of roles. These days he spends his work time on container and cloud native security as a senior security researcher and advocate for Datadog.
He is an active member of the container security community having delivered presentations at a variety of conferences including RSA and OWASP Appsec EU. He has also presented at major security and containerization conferences and is an author of the CIS Benchmarks for Docker and Kubernetes and member of Kubernetes SIG-Security.
Thin clients are deployed across healthcare, finance, government and critical infrastructure, environments where full disk encryption is a compliance requirement, not optional. Dell, IGEL and HP all ship FDE backed by TPM hardware and modern cryptography. I broke all three.
I present new research demonstrating vulnerabilities that permit full disk encryption bypass across Dell ThinOS 9.x – 10.x, HP ThinPro 8.x – 9.x, and IGEL 12. Four operating systems, every attack achieving filesystem access from a powered-off device with no credentials and no specialist hardware. What’s behind the encryption matters: WiFi credentials, 802.1x NAC client certificates, VDI session configs, management server credentials, and password hashes. Compromised devices yield network credentials and a foothold into the infrastructure it was connected to. I trace Dell’s implementation across three generations getting progressively further from best practice, show IGEL’s correct PCR policy and modern cryptography bypassed through their own signed bootloader, and demonstrate HP’s implementation undone by an unmeasured initramfs.
Darren McDonald is an offensive security consultant at AmberWolf, where he specialises in hardware hacking and red teaming. He has spent 17 years breaking into things professionally, starting with networks and applications before moving to embedded systems, firmware, and the physical layer.
As the Linux kernel evolves with enhanced security features, increases deprecation of various symbols (e.g. system call table) and features (e.g. disabling memory protection); and security monitoring evolves with deeper visibility into the internals, traditional rookit methods do not work on modern systems. To remain invisible, modern offensive tooling must move beyond simple hooking and embrace more sophisticated stealth mechanisms. This talk explores kernel-mode stealth mechanisms for modern Linux kernels enabling us to hide our traces from user-mode.
Adhokshaj Mishra works as Staff Detection Engineer specializing in Linux platform. His interest lies in the offensive and defensive side of Linux malware research. He has been working on container specific attacks, and detections in his professional career. In his free time, he mostly researches new offensive techniques in malware as well as applied cryptography. He loves speaking in security meetups and conferences; and has presented in various Null and OWASP chapter meetups, apart from other security events.
Forget prompt injection. While the industry obsesses over manipulating model inputs to bypass guardrails, it is overlooking a far more dangerous threat requiring no user interaction beyond opening the application embedded beneath the AI itself: the underlying platform architecture.
To deliver on the promise of full autonomy, AI-powered coding environments wire Large Language Models directly into the developer workflow—handing them local filesystem access, shell execution, and cloud credentials. Developers accept this tradeoff for the massive productivity gains, but the security cost is severe.
In these environments, privileged OS access is not a misconfiguration but a product requirement. For a chat interface to truly become an autonomous “agent,” it must be equipped with tools. Equipping the AI with these tools creates a structural conflict with traditional application isolation, like Electron’s security model. To make the AI function, developers are forced to break the sandbox and expose highly permissive IPC (Inter-Process Communication) bridges between the web renderer and the local operating system.
This presentation provides a technical deep dive into how chained IDOR vulnerabilities can be escalated into zero-click RCE via persistent LLM conversation injection and unsafe Electron IPC designs. To prove the real-world impact, we will debut novel research into Orchids, a leading local, Electron-based AI coding IDE with over a million users, reported to be used by teams at firms including Google, Amazon, and Uber.
By weaponizing the IDE’s automated context ingestion, we turn the platform’s own features into a silent backdoor, achieving full remote system takeover with no user interaction beyond opening the application.
Attendees will leave this session with a practical understanding of this emerging attack surface, a live demonstration of the zero-click exploit chain, and actionable defensive design patterns for safely architecting the next generation of AI-enabled desktop applications.
Etizaz Mohsin is a cybersecurity researcher focused on advanced threat research and offensive security. His work has explored real-world attack techniques used by sophisticated adversaries, including research on NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, which he presented at Black Hat MEA. Earlier in his career, he investigated the DarkHotel espionage campaign targeting executives and diplomats through compromised hotel networks.
His research has been featured by outlets such as Forbes, BBC, Wired, TechCrunch and Al Jazeera. He has presented at international security conferences including Black Hat Middle East and Africa, HITCON, 44CON, CONFidence, DeepSec, SECTOR, Hacktivity, GreHack, HackFest and Wild West Hackin’ Fest.
Before I was a security engineer, I built market-making engines and low-latency trading systems in C++. Order management, execution routing, exchange connectivity, all running in environments where a microsecond of latency or a single mishandled edge case could cost real money in real time.
That background broke my brain in ways that turned out to be useful for security. When you have spent years thinking about race conditions, memory layout, state machines under adversarial conditions (the market is adversarial), and systems that must never fail silently, you see attack surfaces and defensive gaps that most security engineers walk past.
This talk covers the specific lessons from building trading infrastructure that changed how I approach security engineering: how thinking about latency-sensitive systems reveals timing-based attack surfaces that scanners will never find; why financial systems’ approach to state management and auditability is a better model for security logging than what most SOCs actually deploy; how exchange protocol design (FIX, binary protocols, custom wire formats) teaches you more about parsing vulnerabilities than any web app pen test; and why the failure modes of high-frequency systems map directly onto the failure modes of security automation at scale.
This is not a finance talk. This is a talk about what happens when someone trained to think in microseconds and failure modes starts looking at your infrastructure with an attacker’s mindset and a systems programmer’s understanding of what is actually happening at the metal.
Security engineer with a background in low-latency trading systems. Spent 6+ years building market-making engines and quantitative trading infrastructure in C++ and Scala before moving into security full-time. Now leads vulnerability management, penetration testing, and cloud security programs across multi-cloud environments.
Built SecPortal.io, an Al-nativesecurity workflow platform. OSCP and CISSP certified, Hack The Box Elite Hacker. Technical writing has been featured on Hacker News and Reddit r/netsec.
MSc Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Enterprise AI applications rarely expose OpenAI-compatible APIs, leaving pentesters with a choice: test manually or build custom tooling. During an engagement against a RAG-powered conversational assistant, we encountered a four-step API flow, session creation, query submission, completion polling, and structured response retrieval, that no existing promptfoo provider could handle.
This talk walks through building a custom JavaScript provider that owns the full request lifecycle, enabling automated red teaming with promptfoo’s extensive plugin library. We cover: reverse-engineering the target’s non-standard API; implementing stateful session management for multi-turn attack strategies like Crescendo; routing traffic through Burp Suite with raw socket connections for reliable token refresh via the ATOR extension; and using a locally-hosted Llama 3.3 70B model for both attack generation and automated grading, keeping all client data off external APIs.
We demonstrate how combining 12+ red team plugins (including RAG-specific attacks like document exfiltration and source poisoning) with encoding strategies and multi-turn escalation uncovered vulnerabilities that single-shot manual testing would have missed. We also share the limitations: what promptfoo found at the LLM layer versus what still required manual testing at the application layer (IDOR, authorization bypasses, system prompt extraction).
Attendees will leave with a reusable methodology for adapting promptfoo to any non-standard LLM API, practical guidance on plugin and strategy selection, and an understanding of when automated LLM red teaming adds value, and when it doesn’t.
“Adrian Tiron is Founder and Principal Pentester at FORTBRIDGE, with over 20 years of hands-on cybersecurity experience.
As an active security researcher, Adrian has discovered and responsibly disclosed multiple critical vulnerabilities in open-source and commercial platforms. He has presented his research at conferences including BlueHat IL, OWASP, various BSides events, and Pass The Salt.
Adrian regularly publishes technical research on emerging attack techniques and is currently focused on AI/LLM security testing and cloud-native application security.”
Workshops
This workshop follows Axelle’s talk.
In this workshop, the audience learns how to setup binary disassembly with AI. The workshop consists of a collection of CrackMe or CTF binaries to reverse.
Participants learn to setup OpenCode, MCPs for Ghidra and Radare2. They experience with permissions, creation of agents and skills for reverse engineering. The workshop is tailored to be used with free API keys from various providers. The results are even better if participants can afford a paid subscription, but it is not mandatory.
Requirements
- Participants should have basic knowledge of assembly (what’s an instruction, registers….) and be at ease with installing tools on their laptops.
- Ideally, it’s better if participants have already used a disassembler or a decompiler once in their life before,
but they do not need to expert reverse engineers at all. - Access to Internet is necessary for this workshop.
Axelle Apvrille is a Principal Security Researcher at Fortinet, Fortiguard Labs. Her research interests are mobile and IoT malware that she reverses every day (with, or without AI). In addition, she is the founder of Ph0wn, an on-site Capture The Flag (CTF) competition which focuses on ethical hacking of smart objects. She also plays CTFs, mostly for fun, but with a few recent podiums.
Axelle has spoken at many conferences such as Black Hat Europe, Virus Bulletin, BlackAlps, BruCON, Hack.Lu, NorthSec, Nullcon, r2con, RSA Europe, Troopers… She published in Phrack #71 and in several PagedOut e-Zines. She has also published in academic journals such as IEEE Security & Privacy, or Journal in Computer Virology.
In a prior life, Axelle used to implement cryptographic algorithms and security protocols. This is where her handle “Cryptax” comes from.
The implementation of cryptology is a complex domain, and many cryptographic security issues lie at the implementation level. Insecure implementations may lead to cryptographic flaws even in the most cryptographically secure algorithms. An intentionally poor implementation can also be used to conceal cryptographic backdoors.
This workshop is designed to teach how to avoid pitfalls when implementing cryptography and detect a few bad implementations. It does not cover the case of mathematical backdoors (such as DUAL ECC_RBG case) which is a far more complex domain.
Each main type of vulnerability (or backdoor) is presented followed by the presentation and explanations on how to exploit the identified vulnerability and how to do a secure implementation.
Most of the cases presented are taken from real cases, some of which will be presented later.
The workshop is part of a certification program in cryptography and networks for Thales Group engineers. Moreover, an undergraduate textbook dedicated to this topic is scheduled for publication in early 2027 by Springer Verlag.
This workshop teaches how to implement cryptography securely and address the main security flaws encountered in the wild, as well as how they could have been exploited. Insights into backdoors are also provided through source code analysis.
Target audience and Prerequisites
Participants are expected to have a relatively good command of C programming and to know the basic principles of
cryptography and of secure programming.
Technical requirements
In case participants would like to test some of the code presented during the workshop, a laptop running Linux with
GCC and the GMP library installed is necessary.
Max spent 6 years as an ethical hacker, working with some of the largest organisations and governments on the planet. After seeing how organisations were rapidly adopting an insecure technology in AI agents, combined with a research paper from OpenAI & Deepmind exploring a novel approach to monitoring AI systems, he quit his job and started building the first open-source runtime security toolkit in the industry. He is a regular speaker on BBC News on the topic of AI security.
Sunny has years of offensive cyber security experience working as a penetration tester and a covert red teamer, having spoken at various security conferences around the world on cloud-native security, identity hacking and all that good stuff. He took his adversarial mind to Secure Agentics as Head of Research, where he leads work on the agentic attack surface, finding the ways autonomous agents get compromised in production, and building the detection logic to catch it.
This workshop is designed to teach how to avoid pitfalls when implementing cryptography and detect a few bad implementations. It does not cover the case of mathematical backdoors (such as DUAL ECC_RBG case) which is a far more complex domain.
Each main type of vulnerability (or backdoor) is presented in the form of an exercise (source code to analyze) followed by the presentation and explanations on how to exploit the identified vulnerability and how to do a secure implementation.
Target audience and Prerequisites
Participants are expected to have a relatively good command of C programming and to know the basic principles of
cryptography and of secure programming
Technical requirements
In case participants would like to test some of the code presented during the workshop, a laptop running Linux with
GCC and the GMP library installed is necessary.
Éric Filiol is a senior expert in information and systems security, data security, cyber security and intelligence at Thales Group, Paris. He is also acting as Head of Research & Development for Hope4Sec, in Tallinn Estonia.
He has been professor at various engineer schools and universities in the field of information and systems security until recently. In the last three years he has been in charge of risk and threat assessment, security certification (restricted EU, NATO, Export Control level) of a restricted private cloud in the Defense sector. He directed the research and the cyber security laboratory of a French engineer school for 12 years.
He spent 22 years in the French Army (Infantry/French Marine Corps). He holds an engineering degree in Cryptology, a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Ecole Polytechnique and a Habilitation to Conduct Research (HDR) in Information from the University of Rennes. He holds several NATO certifications in the field of intelligence. He is still deeply involved in R&D (mathematics, programming, code security, information security).
He is editor-in-chief of the research journal in Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques published by Springer.
He regularly gives international conferences in the field of security (Black Hat, CCC, CanSecWest, PacSec, Hack.lu, Brucon, H2HC, Hacktivity, BSides, 44CON…).
This hands-on workshop explores basic attack automation techniques targeting Linux, container and Kubernetes platforms. Participants will learn basic automation techniques using combination of scripting and programming. The workshop will cover a range of TTPs commonly used by TeamTNT, which has mostly targeted cloud and containerized environments.
Prerequisites
Tools
- Laptop with Ubuntu LTS (either host or VM)
- Host: minimum 16GB RAM
- VM: minimum 8GB RAM (headless mode)
- Development tools and libraries (gcc, g++. Gdb, make, make etc.)
- Optional: IDE (anything works)
- Mobile hotspot / internet: to download shared resources, packages, lab materials
Knowledge
- Prior programming experience (ideally in C++ or C), enough to read and understand code
- Prior experience in shell scripting
- Prior debugging experience
- Foundations in Linux, containers, and Kubernetes
Adhokshaj Mishra works as Staff Detection Engineer specializing in Linux platform. His interest lies in the offensive and defensive side of Linux malware research. He has been working on container specific attacks, and detections in his professional career. In his free time, he mostly researches new offensive techniques in malware as well as applied cryptography. He loves speaking in security meetups and conferences; and has presented in various Null and OWASP chapter meetups, apart from other security events.
This hands-on workshop covers various defense evasion techniques targeting Linux platform. Participants will learn basics of security monitoring, telemetry collection, and threat detection in Linux; as well as deep dive into various evasion strategies targeting different security monitoring mechanism. Participants will gain hands-on experience on evasion from scanning, process monitoring, file integrity monitoring, as well as hiding presence of their own payloads in the target system.
Prerequisites
Tools
- Laptop with Ubuntu LTS (either host or VM)
- Host: minimum 16GB RAM
- VM: minimum 8GB RAM (headless mode)
- Development tools and libraries (gcc, g++. Gdb, make, make etc.)
- Optional: IDE (anything works)
- Mobile hotspot / internet: to download shared resources, packages, lab materials
Knowledge
- Prior programming experience (ideally in C++ or C), enough to read and understand code
- Prior debugging experience
- Foundations in Linux, containers, and Kubernetes
Adhokshaj Mishra works as Staff Detection Engineer specializing in Linux platform. His interest lies in the offensive and defensive side of Linux malware research. He has been working on container specific attacks, and detections in his professional career. In his free time, he mostly researches new offensive techniques in malware as well as applied cryptography. He loves speaking in security meetups and conferences; and has presented in various Null and OWASP chapter meetups, apart from other security events.