Xeno Kovah
More info
- Affiliation
- MITRE, LegbaCore, Apple
- Known for
- Firmware security, OpenSecurityTraining
Firmware researcher who thought low-level security should be learnable without first working for an intelligence agency — and gave the courses away.
At MITRE, Kovah led work on measuring whether a machine's BIOS was actually what it claimed to be, and with Corey Kallenberg found one hole after another in how vendors protected firmware. The pair founded LegbaCore in 2015, co-presented Thunderstrike 2 with Trammell Hudson, and then went to Apple.
On the side he ran OpenSecurityTraining: free classes in x86 assembly, reverse engineering and firmware, recorded and openly licensed. After his years at Apple he relaunched it as OpenSecurityTraining2 — one of the few places to learn this material without paying for a certification first.