Ron built his security career in a unique way: writing cheats for video games. In highschool, while others were having fun, he was trying to find new and creative ways to confuse Starcraft.
In this presentation, he will look at some of the major hacks, cheats, and glitches in video games, from famous ones (like arbitrary code execution in Super Mario World) to obscure ones (like stacking buildings in Starcraft).
But more importantly, he will tie these into modern vulnerabilities: the Legend of Zelda "bottle glitch" is a type-confusion vulnerability, for example: similar vulnerabilities in normal software could lead to remote code execution.
This talk will bridge video game cheating with real-world security vulnerabilities, and explore the history of both!
Ron Bowes Principle Security Researcher, GreyNoise Intelligence
Ron Bowes is a Principle Security Researcher on the GreyNoise Labs team, which tracks and investigates unusual--typically malicious--internet traffic. His primary role is to understand and track the big vulnerabilities of the day/week/month/year; often, that means parsing vague vendor advisories, diff'ing patches, reconstructing attacks from log files, and--most complex of all--installing and configuring enterprise software. When he's not at work, he runs the BSides San Francisco Capture the Flag contest, is a founder of The Long Con conference in Winnipeg, takes improv classes, and continues his project to finish every game in his Steam library.