Course Review on System Overlord

Course Review: Reverse Engineering with Ghidra

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a prior reader of the blog, you probably know that when I have the opportunity to take a training class, I like to write a review of the course. It’s often hard to find public feedback on trainings, which feels frustrating when you’re spending thousands of dollars on that course.

Last week, I took the “Reverse Engineering with Ghidra” taught by Jeremy Blackthorne (0xJeremy) of the Boston Cybernetics Institute. It was ostensibly offered as part of the Infiltrate Conference, but 2020 being what it is, there was no conference and it was just an online training. Unfortunately for me, it was being run on East Coast time and I’m on the West Coast, so I got to enjoy some early mornings.

Course Review: Adversarial Attacks and Hunt Teaming

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At DerbyCon 8, I had the opportunity to take the “Adversarial Attacks and Hunt Teaming” presented by Ben Ten and Larry Spohn from TrustedSec. I went into the course hoping to get a refresher on the latest techniques for Windows domains (I do mostly Linux, IoT & Web Apps at work) as well as to get a better understanding of how hunt teaming is done. (As a Red Teamer, I feel understanding the work done by the blue team is critical to better success and reducing detection.)

Course Review: Software Defined Radio with HackRF

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past two days, I had the opportunity to attend Michael Ossman’s course “Software Defined Radio with HackRF” at Toorcon XX. This is a course I’ve wanted to take for several years, and I’m extremely happy that I finally had the chance. I wanted to write up a short review for others considering taking the course.

Course Material

The material in the course focuses predominantly on the basics of Software Defined Radio and Digital Signal Processing. This includes the math necessary to understand how the DSP handles the signal. The math is presented in a practical, rather than academic, way. It’s not a math class, but a review of the necessary basics, mostly of complex mathematics and a bit of trigonometry. (My high school teachers are now vindicated. I did use that math again.) You don’t need the math background coming in, but you do need to be prepared to think about math during the class. Extracting meaningful information from the ether is, it turns out, an exercise in mathematics.

Hardware Hacking, Reversing and Instrumentation: A Review

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I recently attended Dr. Dmitry Nedospasov’s 4-day “Hardware Hacking, Reversing and Instrumentation” training class as part of the HardwareSecurity.training event in San Francisco. I learned a lot, and it was incredibly fun class. If you understand the basics of hardware security and want to take it to the next level, this is the course for you.

The class predominantly focuses on the use of FPGAs for breaking security in hardware devices (embedded devices, microcontrollers, etc.). The advantage of FPGAs is that they can be used to implement arbitrary protocols and can operate with very high timing resolution. (e.g., single clock cycle, since it’s essentially synthesized hardware.)