Market Insights

CNF’s Corey Hartman Black Hat Debut

On Wednesday, August 10th , CNF’s Senior Software Engineer Corey Hartman presented at Black Hat USA 2022, an internationally recognized cybersecurity conference. Hosted at Mandalay Bay resort and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada and virtually worldwide, Corey discussed Glyph.

Developed by Corey himself, Glyph is an architecture independent binary analysis tool for fingerprinting functions through natural language processing (NLP).

Corey explained, “I’ve been researching how we can merge the fields of binary analysis and machine learning together to create new capabilities, so I created Glyph as a launching platform for just that, a place to provide reverse engineers with machine learning capabilities to aid in their workflows.”

A summary of Corey’s presentation on the Black Hat website states, “Reverse engineering is an important task performed by security researchers to identify vulnerable functions and malicious functions in IoT (Internet of Things) devices that are often shared across multiple devices of many system architectures. Common techniques to currently identify the reuse of these functions do not perform cross-architecture identification unless specific data such as unique strings are identified that may be use in identifying a piece of code. Utilizing natural language processing techniques, Glyph allows you to upload an ELF binary (32 & 64 bit) for cross-architecture function fingerprinting, upon analysis, a web-based function symbol table will be created and presented to the user to aid in their analysis of binary executables/shared objects.”

CNF team members have been attending Black Hat since 2008, but this is the first time a teammate has had the honor of presenting. Black Hat, founded in 1997, hosts event series providing some of the most technical and relevant information security research known in the industry. Grown from a single annual conference to the most respected information security event series internationally, Black Hat’s multi-day events provide the security community with the latest cutting-edge research, developments, and trends. Black Hat strives to bring together the best minds in the industry and encourage growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders with trainings held annually in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

More on Corey Hartman…

Corey’s former supervisor Tom Silence, Director of Space & Spectrum Warfare, said Corey was instrumental in satisfying a need for a machine learning capability to support a previous project. He stated that Corey used expertise gained from the work environment, his doctoral dissertation efforts, and House Armed Services Committee prototyping and experimentation to create an array of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques that will be used to defend the Simulated Space Enterprise.

“Corey has a real passion for AI and cyber defense, and in his doctoral work and hobby he’s found multiple vulnerabilities and Zero-Day threats. The speed at which CNF met a new customer’s requirement is evidence of his passion for the science, his advanced skills, and an outstanding work ethic,” stated Tom.

Jason Garcia, Executive Director for CNF Technologies, spoke on Corey’s contributions to the team reporting he’s been instrumental since joining. “Corey eagerly took on roles such as a lead innovator and researcher and ran with it!” He continued to describe Corey’s support in CNF’s research and development efforts stating that during his time with the team, teammates and leaders learned to depend on him for advanced level engineering and developmental skills throughout high level and special projects supporting Independent Research and Development and Air Force Research Lab efforts.

CNF is excited to be in attendance to this year’s conference, but overwhelmingly proud of Corey Hartman and his involvement with Black Hat.

More on Corey’s work…

To view Corey’s work, visit www.malbytes.net