Rafał Wojtczuk
More info
- Alias
- Nergal
- Affiliation
- Invisible Things Lab, later Bromium
- Known for
- Attacks on Xen, SMM and Intel TXT; Qubes OS
Polish low-level researcher who, together with Joanna Rutkowska, showed that most of what sits beneath the operating system can be fooled.
Writing as Nergal, he published a 2001 Phrack article on advanced return-into-libc techniques, one of the precursors of what later became return-oriented programming. He also wrote the libnids network library.
At Rutkowska's Invisible Things Lab he became her closest collaborator. In 2008 they showed how to subvert the Xen hypervisor; in 2009, how to bypass Intel TXT and how to abuse CPU caching to get into System Management Mode, the most privileged execution level on an x86 machine. The conclusion that no single hypervisor or kernel can be trusted became Qubes OS in 2010, which compartmentalises everything into separate virtual machines.