Christopher Domas
More info
- Known for
- movfuscator, sandsifter, Rosenbridge
Security researcher who treats the x86 processor as a black box and finds things its makers would rather not mention.
In 2015 Domas released movfuscator, a compiler that turns C programs into nothing but mov instructions — a working demonstration that the instruction alone is Turing-complete, and a nightmare for anyone trying to reverse-engineer the output. The same year he presented "Memory Sinkhole", a route into the processor's System Management Mode.
2017 brought sandsifter, a fuzzer that systematically walks instruction encodings and turned up undocumented opcodes and errata across several vendors. A year later came Rosenbridge: a hidden coprocessor in VIA C3 chips which, once enabled, let ordinary user code reach kernel privileges — a backdoor baked into the silicon.