Systems & Platform Research

In this blogpost @astralvx will describe the physical hardware attack to capture a Bitlocker key in transit across the SPI bus. All information here is in the public domain in one form or another and not proprietary. We shall discuss the details of Bitlocker, boot flow from pre-boot to OS, … Continue reading Stealing the Bitlocker key from a TPM

In this blogpost @astralvx will introduce Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe), a standard for connecting high-speed component to PC’s such as video cards, network cards, raid controllers, NVME SSDs, WIFI cards, etc. From PCI 1.0 introduced in the 90’s at speeds of 130 MB/s, the bandwidth has been doubling every … Continue reading Introduction to PCIe

When writing assembly in Real Mode as 16 bit, all posts online (stackoverflow, etc) all talk from the perspective of developing on Linux. However in this blogpost we’ll go through how easy it is to adapt these techniques to work from a Windows host, and get Cygwin GDB to understand … Continue reading Debugging 16-bit in QEMU with GDB on Windows

Many of you may have used PCIe Screamer by LambdaConcept and variants with firmware by U. Frisk, for all sorts of activities from physical pentests, bypassing antiviruses, bypass anticheat products in games, and so on. In this blogpost @astralvx will explain the PCIe packet TLP used in bus mastering/DMA. Introduction … Continue reading DMA explained

By @AstralVx. The badge for 2020 was a cassette, but the challenges were split over 3 items – the cassette badge (sides A and B), the lanyard, and the liner (front and back) as seen in the images below. In summary the challenges consisted of ciphers from rot n, Vignere, … Continue reading DEF CON 28 – Badge Challenges