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**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yeah, exactly. So we do have such teams at Kaspersky, but most cybersecurity companies will have either their internal incident responders... |
**Ian Lopshire:** Swoop in? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** ...or a contractor that they know often, that can be called at any hour of the day or the night, and that will come and just -- exactly, swoop in with the big guns if something weird took place. Now, it doesn't mean that we do not work in direct interaction with those teams. It means that this is ... |
But most of the intelligence that we create doesn't actually come from incident response cases. I think it would be a good idea if we were able to gain more information from that source as well. I think it's a very valuable one. But we work mostly on the telemetry collected by our antivirus - all the samples that are s... |
**Ian Lopshire:** That's cool. Thanks for that insight. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** From the other side of this equation, what are some tips you can give for writing secure software for people who do Go? Or in general, if it's not specific to Go, it's also useful. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yeah. I think one of the main appeals of Go is that you don't really need to think about security as much as with other languages. Go is a memory-safe language, unless I'm mistaken, and the compiler is never going to let you do stupid stuff, like create an array that is too small, and then write s... |
\[42:25\] I saw that Go really helps you with cryptography. I noticed that it's very difficult to choose algorithms that are not safe. By default, you can only -- I don't think you can choose the algorithms in Go by -- I know you can do AES, for instance, but like the cipher mode, or those kinds of stuff tends to be, u... |
But -- oh, yeah, the IV... I was working on some code in Go that was relying on AES. I was looking at trying to figure out exactly how the IV was generated, and so on. I was seeing that nowhere the developer code, and doing some research, I noticed that it was actually Go that would, by itself, generate an IV for the e... |
So it's very obvious to me that Go was created with security in mind, not for the developers, but by the Go creators. They don't want you to shoot yourself in the foot, and they are going to make sure that there is no way for you to do it, unless you really, really want to. |
Even though you do have all those kinds of protections, cryptography can be misused. If you choose a bad key, then nobody's going to save you from that. If your protocol doesn't work, then again, you cannot be protected from it either. But I think it allows people to focus on design flaws, instead of programming flaws.... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** That is a very interesting insight. |
**Ian Lopshire:** That's interesting. I see a lot of complaints outside of the GO community, just like Hacker News, about "Go is choosing your defaults for TLS, or not letting you do certain things..." But that's one I'm firmly on board with. If I don't need to think about it, I don't want to. And I don't want to make ... |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Would you be able to confidently select your defaults for TLS? I mean, I don't think I would feel comfortable doing this. You have to be very well-versed in cryptography to be able to make those kinds of decisions. So it's very good that Go is not making you do this, I think, in my opinion. |
**Break:** \[44:44\] to \[46:37\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Another interesting -- about your interest in Go, you mentioned that you started using Go because malware was thrown at you, kind of... |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yeah, exactly. So I wouldn't say that I've started using Go; I would say that I was forced to learn Go. Not that I am unhappy about it... I'm not saying it's a bad thing. What I'm saying is that I'm not really writing Go code myself. What I did was I had assembly that was generated by the Go compi... |
Also, when I start to learn about a language when I want to reverse-engineer it, I think it's super-useful to write some simple programs and just compile it and see how it looks at the assembly level. You know, just create a simple, stupid C function. Not C function, but some function that adds two integers, or somethi... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** You mentioned that IDA, which is the main tool you're using, and the other tool, are not really supporting Go. So if anybody wants to try reverse-engineer, to get into that, but also want to do that with Go, what would you recommend how to do that? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** So if you're going to reverse-engineer Go programs, I still think that you don't have much choice there. So you're still going to have to use either IDA Pro or Ghidra. I want to switch to Ghidra eventually, but I haven't done so at the moment, so I cannot speak too much about its capabilities. I'm... |
But overall, even though IDA might not be perfect for the job, it's still one of the two only tools that are available for the job. So you still have to work through it, no matter what. The thing is, I find myself thinking that even though starting with reverse-engineering Go is kind of difficult, it turns out that I f... |
\[50:25\] So overall, my advice for people that would like to get started with Go reverse-engineering is, okay, it's going to be very different from what you're used to, but at the end of the day, I think you're going to end up liking it more than you would think, because it's going to be way easier than it looks. |
**Ian Lopshire:** How about those listeners that haven't done any reverse-engineering, that want to get started? Do you have any good resources out there? I know that you personally have made some videos. Do you want to talk about that a little bit, and anything else that would be helpful? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** So yeah, the videos that I put out are just related to the Go language. If you're going to get into reverse-engineering, I would not advise you to start with Go. Not because it's going to be harder or anything, but because probably, the basics of reverse-engineering are going to be related to trad... |
But I think C is always going to be used as a reference for other languages, in the sense that when you look at assembly, first you try to understand it like you would understand C, and then if it's different, you adapt from that. But if your baseline is going to be the Go language, if the one thing you know is Go and ... |
So we do have a few courses at Kaspersky, people can check them out if they want. There are a few interesting online courses as well. It's something for free, which is beginners.re; it's a website, it used to be free, maybe now it's behind a paywall, I'm not sure, but it used to be this big, big reverse-engineering cou... |
And finally, if you want to approach this from the fun angle, I can actually recommend extremely good Steam games that allow you to get a feel for reverse-engineering. One of them is called Turing Complete. The pitch of this game is you're going to build your own computer. And so you start with -- they give you logic g... |
So it's really super-helpful to understand how a program works, or how a computer works. It allows you to get this high-level bird's eye view of how a CPU is constructed, and how it's supposed to operate. And knowing how CPUs work is then very, very helpful when you are doing reverse-engineering. |
And then you have other games, which are from a developer which is called Zachtronics. These are weird puzzle games that are really related to computing problems. One of them is called TIS-100, you have another one called EXAPUNKS, and they are dubbed "the assembly games you didn't know you wanted." And it's actually a... |
**Ian Lopshire:** \[54:15\] Yeah, I have not thought about games. I'm gonna check those out later, actually. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** And actually, if you are working from a university, or if you're a teacher somewhere, Zachtronics. I think the company may be closed doors not too long ago; I think they are done making games, or they moved on to something else, but they used to have a very extensive education program, where if yo... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** A lot of the things you said are like a cheatsheet for reverse-engineering. Lots of useful information, and I have so many more questions about specific things about Go and reverse-engineering; we might have to do another episode about this, because we are running out of time. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Sure. Well, I can come back whenever you like. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** We will prepare our questions, we'll ask you about things like generics... |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** I will have to prepare those questions as well, I guess... But no problem. \[laughter\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Now, it's time for an unpopular opinion. |
**Jingle:** \[55:33\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So Ivan, what is your unpopular opinion for us? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Oh, my God, I totally forgot about that. But it's okay. The good thing is I do have many unpopular opinions, so I'm going to give you things off the top of my head, and you can tell me what you want to know more about. For instance, I think that cyberspace is never going to be regulated. I think t... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** What do you think about the European rule about USB-C, standardizing USBs? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Oh, I'm very, very happy about it. I know it's some pressure put on some device constructors, but I've been carrying lots of different chargers for years, and I'm super-annoyed about this... And knowing that we are going to switch to like a single USB-C for every single device makes me extremely, ... |
Another unpopular opinion I have, which you can add to the list, is that I'm not really a big fan of Apple. Like, not at all. I don't like their ecosystem. And I'm not going to get into this, but one of the things I don't like is that people have to pay 40 bucks for new chargers, and they change chargers every time the... |
**Ian Lopshire:** What do you think about all the walled systems, like the Google Play Store, and the Apple Store, and the Amazon store? From a security practice perspective, they say it's safer. Do you agree with that? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yeah, this is a very good question. I do have very ambiguous feelings about them. I do believe that on the security perspective, it's kind of a good thing, in the sense that yeah, it's another one of those safeguards that prevent people from doing stupid stuff with their devices... And having to g... |
\[58:23\] So I think a better way of securing those devices is not to control the app stores. Creating protections on the device level is probably where I would work. So when you look at both iOS and Android, they are doing, I think, a very good job of -- or have been doing a very good job, at least in the past years, ... |
But overall, the other issue with walled gardens, which is, okay, maybe they do provide something with security, but also I feel like they take away some agency from me as a user, right? I really like to own the devices that I use, and having some restrictions that tell me "Oh, you cannot install this app because Googl... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So you mentioned a lot of unpopular opinions... |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yes. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** The way that Twitter works for our podcast is that we take an unpopular opinion and then we make a vote. So there's a poll - do people agree with you or not? And then there's a Hall of Fame for unpopular opinions, and for popular unpopular opinions. So you listed several... Which one would you ... |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** So if I wanted to win the contest, I guess I would go with the NFT one, because I know that this is something very divisive, and I think that a lot of the audience that you are reaching is going to be probably -- I'm not going to say that they are necessarily going to be on my side, but I think th... |
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