REcon 2013 - The Future of RE : Dynamic Binary Visualization (Christopher Domas)

Sébastien Duquette
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2015–2024
YouTube
9K views · 12 years ago · talk · expert · evergreen

Christopher Domas presents his cantor.dust tool at REcon 2013, which visualizes binary files so structure and patterns can be seen at a glance. It includes 3D pan, tilt and zoom views of byte trigraphs used for reverse engineering.

HN people say it blew their mind and made hexdumps and debuggers feel primitive, and it is the reference whenever binary visualization comes up.

“my mind was forever blown. Working with hexdumps, debuggers, disassemblers etc. seems so stone-agey compared to that.”
Data visualizationTools for thought & programming UX
#cantor.dust#binaryvisualization#reverseengineering#trigraphs#christopherdomas#recon

5 comments from Hacker News

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@LargoLasskhyfv2017 · in “Unexpected Risks Found in Editing Genes to Prevent Inherited Disorders”
Maybe it's a matter of tooling. I don't want to appear disrespectful, but after having seen Christopher Domas present "The Future of RE: Dynamic Binary Visualization" my mind was forever blown. Working with hexdumps, debuggers, disassemblers etc. seems so stone-agey compared to that. Like so much in IT in general. Anyways, caveman CAN more than crawl, obviously ;-) So, if you have up to an hour of time to waste, maybe you can have your mind blown to cantor dust too? link ▶ this video Something very similar seems to be developed here: link Happy New Cyber! edit: spelling
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h
@hoosieree2024 · in “Show HN: Bin-graph: Visualize binary files”
Have you checked out this demo? ▶ this video The 3d pan/tilt/zoom visualizations of the trigraphs are especially nice to look at.
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o
@oldmanludd2023 · in “Ask HN: Are There Viewers for Memory Layout?”
I don't think it's quite what you're looking for but cantor.dust is an interesting visualization tool for binary data. Security conference presentation from a decade ago: ▶ this video Release of open-source Ghidra plugin in 2020: link
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v
@vanderZwan2016 · in “Binvis.io – Visual Analysis of Binary Files”
Reminds me of my favourite piece of vaporware: cantor.dust link ▶ this video
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j
@jsprogrammer2015 · in “X86 rootkit”
Yep. I didn't read most of the last 1/2-1/3 of the slides, but it looks like the magic number may be different for each machine (ie. there is no one binary to rule them all[all though you could probably trivially generate all possibilities])? And that there is at least some process involved in determining the number what the number is? The author is legit. Here's a somewhat recent talk he gave: ▶ this video
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