Hello! My name is Matt Suiche. I am an independent researcher, advisor, and investor. I previously served as the Head of Detection Engineering at Magnet Forensics. Our organization was passionately dedicated to justice and protecting the innocent, a mission we embarked on more intensely after the 2022 acquisition of my cybersecurity start-up, Comae Technologies.
My life-long fascination with learning and understanding complex systems first led me to cybersecurity. My teenage years were spent immersed in reverse engineering, which ignited a profound curiosity about technology that continues to this day. I’ve since explored various fields including operating systems architecture, programming languages, virtualization, modern web application development, and generative art. Furthermore, I’ve delved into numerous domains such as privacy, surveillance, forensics, blockchain, and community development among others.
Introduction 🔗Once again compression algorithms are showing us that they are ruling the internet. My initial encounter with compression algorithms was in the year 2007, while reversing the Windows hibernation file to reimplement the now well-known Microsoft LZXpress which I discovered later was used in most Microsoft products until today. This journey continues today, with the scrutiny of the vulnerability CVE-2023-4863 located within the open-source Libwebp library, affecting Chromium-based browsers such as such Mozilla, Chrome, and Edge but also messaging applications such as iMessage.
Earlier this month, I reached out to my friend Valentina and told her I wanted to learn about macOS/iOS exploitation, so she recommended taking a look at the CVE-2021-30860 vulnerability, also known as FORCEDENTRY, and the prior work her friend Jeffrey Hofmann posted on Twitter.
One year ago, Google Project Zero published an analysis of the NSO iMessage-based zero-click exploit caught in-the-wild by Citizen Lab and was dubbed as “one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we’ve ever seen” by the Google Project Zero team.
POC is one of the top conference in Asia and has been running since 2006, and today I’ve had the opportunity to give the opening keynote (Slides) for POC 2022 conference in Seoul, Korea where I discussed our favorite memory safe language: Rust - thanks again to the organizers for the invitation.
I chose to discuss Rust from a software engineering and application security point of view. The main points were:
