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The thing is, I do believe that -- I don't think that we will ever reach an agreement there, because, well, states do not have an incentive to regulate cyber offense. I think that they have an interest in having a way, or having some kind of framework that allows them to still conduct operations, because when they cond... |
On the other hand, when you look at the cost of cyber offense, which means all your companies in your country that have been breached because there are no such norms, it's something that's super-hard to quantify. You can never know that you lost some contracts overseas to sell planes, or to sell something else because ... |
So the thing is, you look at the balance of risk/reward for the decision-makers, and they see "This is what we win with cyber offense", which is a lot. And what they lose - it's painless. And also, they have no idea what it is. And so overall, I think that all those discussions that are taking place, that are saying, "... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Alright. You will be tagged, and we will be following the results. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Okay. |
**Ian Lopshire:** I'm interested to see the results on this one. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. |
**Ian Lopshire:** It's an interesting way to think about it. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yeah, I want to know what's well. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Cool. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge, your thoughts and your opinions with us. This was really fascinating. We will be very happy to have you again. Thanks a lot, Ivan. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Well, thank you very much for having me. And yeah, feel free to call me up anytime, and I will be happy to be back. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Thanks, Ian, for joining. It was fun co-hosting together. |
**Ian Lopshire:** Yeah. Thanks to you guys. This was great. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Bye, everyone! |
• Introduction of Ivan Kwiatkowski, a French cybersecurity researcher who works with Kaspersky in threat intelligence |
• Discussion on reverse-engineering Go programs and how IDA Pro has improved its support for the language over time |
• Comparison of Go as a language for security researchers versus hackers |
• Analysis of Rust as a more complex and challenging language to reverse-engineer compared to Go or C++ |
• Evaluation of easy cross-compilation in Go and whether it's a significant feature that sets it apart from other languages |
• Go's support for various architectures and platforms |
• Benefits of compiling a single binary versus multiple files (DLLs/shared objects) |
• Discussion on the value of Go's module system for security researchers and hackers |
• Analysis of how Go's memory safety features improve code security compared to C/C++ |
• Mention of the potential difficulty in measuring the security benefits of Go code |
• Discussion on the safety of using COBOL in modern systems |
• Brief mention of malware written in COBOL |
• Comparison between Pascal and Go programming languages |
• Explanation of the differences in assembly representation between various programming languages |
• Description of compiler optimizations and their impact on reverse engineering |
• Discussion of the complexity of C++, Go, and other high-level languages compared to low-level languages like C |
• Go compiler optimizations and their impact on code size and complexity |
• Goroutines and their effect on reverse-engineering and program understanding |
• Challenges of debugging and understanding multi-threaded programs in reverse-engineering |
• Visualizing and understanding program flow in multi-threaded environments |
• Importance of simplicity and readability in coding practices, but limitations when it comes to compiler optimizations and assembly code. |
• Go programs can return multiple values from functions |
• This can result in complex assembly code due to differing conventions compared to languages like C and C++ |
• The Go language enforces error checking and handling through its compiler, making it difficult to ignore errors |
• Good practices are often followed in malware code, as seen by the speaker's observations of several examples |
• In assembly code, error values are checked by comparing them with a nil value, indicating that errors were handled properly. |
• Code generation AI: its potential for guessing the user's thoughts while writing code |
• Image generation AI (Midjourney, Lex) and its capabilities |
• Possibility of reverse-engineering programs using machine learning |
• Benefits of strict programming languages for AI understanding and code generation |
• Assembly language as a precise and consistent option for AIs to work with |
• Current state of reverse engineering tools (IDA Pro, Ghidra) and lack of AI application |
• Potential need for specialized AIs in different languages (C, C++, Go, etc.) |
• Challenge of finding individuals with expertise in both reverse engineering and data science |
• Development of a plugin to analyze malware in the style of known developers |
• Existing research projects attempting to identify developer penmanship characteristics from open source code |
• Potential applications for intelligence agencies to identify malware authors |
• Use of algorithmic methods vs. current blackbox AI capabilities in this field |
• Discussion of potential future directions for research and development |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Today, Ivan Kwiatkowski, you are joining us again, to talk more about hacking with Go and cover all the things we did not manage to cover in our last episode. |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yes, very happy to be back here. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So for those who did not tune in to the previous episode, could you shortly introduce yourself? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yes, of course. So my name is Ivan Kwiatkowski. I am a French cybersecurity researcher, and I work for Kaspersky. Specifically, I work in a threat intelligence team, and my role in this team, apart from writing reports, and that kind of stuff, is really to proceed with the reverse-engineering of t... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And in the previous episode, we talked a little bit about how IDA is yes or no support in Go, and that it got better over time, but still place to improve... |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Yeah, absolutely. So if you tried reverse-engineering Go programs something like maybe two years ago, maybe just one year ago, then you would be in a lot of trouble, because the tools just weren't there. So it involved using some third-party plugins, some code taken from - I wouldn't say suspiciou... |
So I do expect that one year from now maybe this won't even be a discussion anymore. I mean, sure, Go will still be a very kind of alien language for us to look at in terms of like the assembly code that it generates, but at the end of the day, I do suspect that the tooling problems are going to be over in the near fut... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So is Go a better language for a security researcher to pick up, or for a hacker? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** Well, when it comes to security researchers, we don't actually have to write that many programs. Most of the tools that we use are already provided to us by the community. I mentioned IDA Pro - nobody is ever going to redevelop IDA Pro. I mean, some guys did, so it wouldn't be fair saying that the... |
When it comes to a hacker, I think that for them the Go language is still probably a very good bet, because as far as I can tell from a very unscientific polling of my co-workers and other reverse engineers in the field, it feels like most people still really dislike having to work on the Go language; like really, real... |
In my opinion though, if I were to write malicious programs, I would use Rust, because the code generated by Rust is actually even way worse. And at the moment, I'm not exactly sure how to approach that type of code. I have to work on that, but this would be my intuition - to use Rust, because I know that I'm going to ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And when you say "worse", you mean basically because the steps that you need to do to reverse-engineer and kind of figure out what's happening are actually more painful... |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** \[08:06\] Exactly. I say that in the sense that -- maybe it's just a personal thing, right? I have spent a bit of time trying to figure out how Go ticks, not at the language level, but at least at the assembly level; I would never pretend that I am a Go expert, or that I have deep insights about t... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** How about the easy cross-compilation of Go? The fact that you write your code, and then you create one binary, and then you kind of ship it as is, and on top of that you just write one more command and then you have it for any architecture? Does this make any difference for you? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** It does, in the sense that I think as a developer, it's pretty cool to have that. I also have always felt that this feature that is very often brought forward by defenders of the Go language was a bit -- I don't think it's that important, right? Not that we don't want cross-compilation or that we ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So as you're asking, I googled the command \[unintelligible 00:11:35.24\] which is what you run to do this, and for Solaris, it does come out of the box. What was the second one you asked for? |
**Ivan Kwiatkowski:** This one is going to be supported, I would imagine. It would be to compile for ARM or MIPS, probably less used architectures... But I would imagine that at least ARM is supported very well. |
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