Hovav Shacham
More info
- Known for
- Return-oriented programming (2007), BLS signatures (2001)
- Affiliation
- UC San Diego, UT Austin
The researcher who showed you don't need to inject any code to hijack a program — the code already there will do.
Once non-executable memory became standard, plenty of people assumed classic stack exploits were finished. Shacham's ACM CCS 2007 paper, memorably titled "The Geometry of Innocent Flesh on the Bone", showed that short instruction sequences ending in ret — "gadgets" — in an ordinary libc on x86 are enough for Turing-complete computation. He named the technique return-oriented programming.
He had already left a mark on cryptography: BLS signatures (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham, 2001), from his PhD years under Dan Boneh, now underpin Ethereum's consensus. He was also a co-author of the 2011 study showing how cars could be hacked remotely.