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 Lead Security Researcher, Rapid7
During the day, Ron Bowes is a lead vulnerability researcher at Rapid7, where his job is to perform deep-dive analyses of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, as well as to find (and report) his own. His previous role at Counter Hack Security was combo pentester / CTF developer.
In his free time, he runs (and writes challenges for) the BSides San Francisco CTF and is a lead organizer for The Long Con security conference in Winnipeg. When he's not doing infosec work, his biggest hobbies are rockclimbing and video games (current game: Slay the Spire!)