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**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, built-in function. |
**Steve Francia:** I don't think it's a keyword... |
**Jerod Santo:** I can't believe "return" wasn't on there. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I'm guessing that things like "new", "panic", and there's a couple others that people probably think are keywords, even though they're not... |
**Mat Ryer:** Because they're built-in functions... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I mean, some of them I wouldn't know unless I looked at the spec and was like "Okay, what actually is this?" |
**Mat Ryer:** There's loads of built-in functions as well... See, I did a talk at Gotham Go, Steve, and I remember showing the list of -- I showed the list, and you were like, "They're not them." And I was like doing my talk, trying to concentrate and be professional. And you're like "That's not them..." And I was like... |
**Steve Francia:** Mat, we know you're not telling the truth though, because I've known you a long time and I've yet to see you be professional once... \[laughter\] |
• Discussion of Ivan Kwiatkowski's work as a senior security researcher at Kaspersky |
• Analysis of the SolarWinds attack and its impact on high-profile customers |
• Reverse-engineering of malware written in Go, including SUNSHUTTLE and Stowaway |
• Examples of other malware families written in Go, such as Brute Ratel |
• Ease of use for developers due to statically-built executables |
• Difficulty of reverse-engineering Go programs due to goroutines and architecture |
• Advantages of using Go for attackers due to its ease of use and difficulty of detection |
• Go's unique assembly generation makes it difficult to analyze using traditional methods or automated tools |
• The compiler's optimization techniques, such as reusing memory space for local variables, can make variable tracking and renaming challenging |
• Return values in Go often require manual handling due to the language's ability to return multiple values and the lack of a standard register for storing them |
• Changes in Go convention, such as passing arguments through registers instead of the stack, have improved analysis but not resolved the core challenges |
• Go compiler creates code that is difficult for reverse-engineering tools to decompile |
• IDA Pro struggles to recreate pseudo C code from Go language, due to its concepts and complexities |
• Reverse engineering involves understanding a program's behavior without source code access |
• Malware authors often use complex languages like Go to make analysis more challenging |
• The ratio of Go lines to assembly code can be as high as 1:100 or 1:1000 |
• Other languages, such as C and C++, may have similar ratios, but the problem is not the number of assembly instructions, but rather their complexity and unexpected behavior |
• Improvements in tooling and pattern recognition are needed for better Go language support |
• Go's compiler can jump between different sections of code unexpectedly when debugging |
• This can be confusing for reverse-engineers who are used to seeing the flow of instructions in other languages |
• Go's compiler optimizes function calls by reusing variables on the stack, making it harder to understand the program flow |
• The language is very strict and enforces conventions at compile-time, which can help with reverse-engineering by providing clear expectations about code behavior |
• Go's consistency and predictability make it a good choice for hackers and security researchers who are used to dealing with traditional languages |
• Discussion of programming languages used by hackers and researchers |
• Advantages and limitations of memory-safe languages like Go |
• Types of malware and attack methods (lateral movement, stealthy attacks) |
• Role of incident response teams and antivirus companies in collecting and analyzing data |
• Comparison between working with incident response cases versus analyzing telemetry data from antivirus |
• Tips for writing secure software in general, with focus on Go's memory safety features |
• Go language and its security features |
• Using Go for reverse-engineering malware |
• Challenges of reversing Go code due to compiler optimizations |
• Tools available for reverse-engineering Go (IDA, Ghidra) |
• Importance of understanding basics of reverse-engineering in traditional C or assembly code before moving on to other languages like Go |
• Recommended resources for learning reverse-engineering and the Go language |
• Practical Malware Analysis book as a resource for beginners |
• Using Steam games for reverse-engineering practice (Turing Complete, TIS-100, EXAPUNKS) |
• Zachtronics' education program and free game access for universities and educators |
• Unpopular opinions on: |
• Cyberspace regulation |
• NFTs being a scam |
• Lack of political will to limit cyber offense tools sales |
• USB-C standardization in Europe |
• Dislike of Apple ecosystem and their revenue stream from charger sales |
• Ambiguity about walled gardens (e.g. Google Play Store, Apple Store) for security and user agency |
• The NFT contest and its potential divisiveness among the audience |
• Cyber regulation: the difficulty of reaching a consensus on norms for behavior in cyberspace |
• The incentives of states to regulate or not regulate cyber offense |
• The balance of risk/reward for decision-makers regarding cyber operations |
• The possibility that discussions about creating a safer internet are being conducted in bad faith. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Hello, everyone who is joining us today, on a Wednesday of the recording. We normally record on a Tuesday, but we have a very special guest, so we need to make a very special event about that. Ian is my co-host today. Hi, Ian. |
**Ian Lopshire:** Hey. How are you doing, Natalie? |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Good! I'm very excited to have Ivan today join us. Ivan Kwiatkowski , also known on Twitter as @JusticeRage. You are a senior security researcher at Kaspersky. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yes. Hello, very happy to be here. Indeed. So I work in the threat intelligence field, and my daily work involves looking at malware and writing reports about it. Basically, the activity that I'm involved in is trying to figure out what the attackers are up to, what kind of tools they're using, me... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And there's a very cool video that has two parts of you reverse-engineering a malware written about a year ago, that was written in Go, actually. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Absolutely. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And that was from the SolarWinds attack. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Exactly. This specific example comes from the SolarWinds incident, which I'm pretty sure that most listeners will be aware of, because it was such a high media impact case. To make a quick summary about it, what happened was a company called -- I always get those mixed up; I think the name of the ... |
**Ian Lopshire:** I think the way the way you have it is right. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Okay, great. That wasn't really a 50/50 chance there. Anyway, this company got attacked, but it wasn't attacked for the information that it had, because it was just a software company, which in itself had little value as an intelligence target. But the thing was that it had a high number of high p... |
So the very first stage of the attack was just some modification of the code of the original program. This part was written in .NET. But then the second part, which is called SUNSHUTTLE, was actually written in Go language. So it was for me like the first time I was getting involved in reverse-engineering for the Go la... |
**Ian Lopshire:** So that's one famous example of Go malware. Are there other famous ones written in Go that you can think of off the top of your head? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** \[07:58\] Yeah. So from the same incident, one of the companies that was breached through the SolarWinds incident was Mandiant; it now belongs to Google. And they were the ones that actually detected that there was something wrong in the network and reported it... And so kudos to them really, grea... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** We'll add a link to that in the show notes. That sounds interesting. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yeah, sure. It's a networking tool. It's really something that proxies the stuff in and out of a network that goes between protocols, and that kind of stuff. It's written in Go language; pretty annoying to reverse-engineer it, because it's a lot of goroutines talking to each other, very hard to fi... |
And another example I can think about, that I'm not 100% sure, but I do believe that a commercial backdoor called Brute Ratel, which is a big competitor, or a new competitor maybe to Global Strike, which places enormous emphasis on evading detection, and being able to slip through EDR solutions etc. is also written in ... |
**Ian Lopshire:** Why do you think we're going to see more and more? Is there a specific reason? You mentioned that they were hard to reverse-engineer... Is that part of it, or all of it, or...? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yeah, there are a few reasons. The first reason I think is probably related to the ease of use for the developers. I don't mean that Go is easier to program than other languages, but the fact that it generates statically-built executables, binaries that are self-contained, that do not need any add... |
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