PRESENTATIONS
Enterprise server platforms are the bedrock of the modern internet. It would stand to reason that the foundation of IT infrastructure, the firmware and hardware of those systems, would be especially well audited and secured against advanced attackers. Unfortunately, history shows that the resilience of these components has suffered from an ever-increasing attack surface and insufficient scrutiny; today, this trend is only accelerating with the mass adoption of complex AI infrastructure at unprecedented rates.
In this work, we focus on analyzing the security of the Data Processing Unit (DPU), which has become ubiquitous in AI datacenters. This computer-in-front-of-a-computer promises to shield its host server by offloading networking, encryption, and security-related logic away from the host processor. But what happens when the DPU itself becomes the weak link? In this presentation, we demonstrate a UEFI secure boot bypass on the Nvidia Bluefield 3 DPU, and use it to build the first known DPU bootkit. We then show how it is possible to launch a DMA attack from the DPU targeting the host.
Microsoft's Resilient File System (ReFS) is a filesystem primarily found on Windows Server machines, designed for large-scale storage with built-in data integrity and resiliency. Its kernel driver parses a complex set of on-disk structures, most of which have very little official documentation, though the ReFuzz paper (2022) provided an extended foundation that proved invaluable during this research. In this talk, I will walk through the internals of ReFS, the strategies used to attack the driver, and the vulnerabilities discovered along the way. Multiple vulnerabilities were found including CVE-2026-49793 and CVE-2026-49792, which can be triggered by just mounting a crafted disk and performing some basic I/O with standard user privileges. The vulnerabilities were found in ReFS on-disk structures, particularly compression-related ones that have never been publicly documented previously.
This talk will walk through the internals of ReFS, the different strategies used to attack the driver, and the vulnerabilities discovered along the way.
Leveraging large language models for vulnerability discovery has become an important paradigm in security research. However, large-scale automated deployment still faces two major obstacles. First, LLM-generated vulnerability reports often suffer from high false-positive rates, creating substantial manual review costs. Second, vulnerability research requires more than report generation: it must integrate discovery, validation, PoC construction, and patch generation. In this talk, we present an end-to-end automated vulnerability research agent system for large codebases.
When using LLMs to audit large codebases, we frequently observe performance degradation as more code is added to the model context, even before the context window is full. Context management is therefore a primary focus of our work. We introduce three context-management mechanisms: reasoning-trace-driven adaptive compression, semantics-aware context separation, and report-directed context construction. With this design, our system identifies substantially more vulnerabilities than Claude Code in our experiments while maintaining a low false-positive rate.
We further extend our system with dynamic validation for Linux kernel vulnerabilities. Using a specially designed harness, the system iteratively debugs candidate vulnerabilities inside a QEMU environment and constructs PoCs capable of triggering KASAN.
For automated patch generation, we use multi-agent collaboration and fine-grained context management to reduce incorrect or incomplete fixes, unintended side effects, and new vulnerabilities introduced by generated patches. By separating patch generation and patch validation into dedicated agents, we establish a review-and-refinement loop that improves patch correctness and completeness.
To date, maintainers have confirmed 90 zero-day vulnerabilities identified by our system across projects including the Linux kernel, VirtualBox, and open-vm-tools. Of these, 62 have been fixed and 51 have been assigned CVE identifiers.
Apex Ghost: Unmasking Online Predators examines how Sadistic Online Exploitation (SOE) and Nihilistic Violent Extremist (NVE) networks identify, groom, and coerce young people—and what cybersecurity professionals can do to stop them. Through real-world cases, Ralph Logan shows how intelligence gaps allow known offenders to continue operating and how Apex Ghost combines threat hunting, open-source intelligence, data analysis, and cross-verified evidence to unmask perpetrators and deliver actionable intelligence to law enforcement. The session offers a stark look at adversary tradecraft, the limits of fragmented reporting, and how the security community can apply its capabilities and partnerships to protect children and drive real-world intervention.
Can higher order descriptive metadata alone aid automated exploitation of code repositories? Or are we stuck waiting for more sophisticated language models?
A Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) is a program that can use threat information and source code to find and patch vulnerabilities in a code repository automatically. These systems increasingly use large language models for search with great effect, and the solution space for these systems has become very diverse. In this talk I will argue that while there is a very valid space for using a cyber reasoning system to protect key libraries, the solution space it often produces is narrower than desired.
To explore this notion of implementation versus algorithmic flaws in code, we will walk through a cyber security harness that produces code for the Lean 4 proof assistant as an intermediate representation language. The demo will explore this in practice with the Anthropic Glasswing demo harness, displaying the trade offs of using proof metadata as part of a cyber reasoning system. We'll contrast this with a larger parallel system that operates proof metadata in the context of an implementation of OSS-CRS.
We analyze an AI-native smartphone where a language model acts as an execution layer, perceiving screen content and autonomously performing user interactions (e.g., clicks, swipes) across apps—effectively granting a GUI agent system-level control.
We present a security analysis of this architecture and showcase its security concerns. Despite built-in safeguards around sensitive operations and personal data, we demonstrate that the system can be systematically steered into performing attacker-controlled actions, enabling access to private data (e.g., memory, messages, media) and even participation in multi-stage attack chains.
We further study the evolving defence mechanisms deployed on the cloud side and observe a continuous attacker–defender dynamic and a clear tradeoff between security and usability. Our findings include a prompt-based exploitation technique that remains effective against recent mitigations (as of Feb. 2026), as well as insights into cloud-side logic obtained after achieving root access on the device.
This work highlights the security implications of treating LLMs as execution layers and frames prompt injection as a practical, persistent exploitation primitive in real-world smartphone systems.
Modern inference systems load model artifacts they did not create. A checkpoint from a model hub, fine-tuning vendor, or conversion pipeline is parsed into tensors and consumed by native C++, CUDA, HIP, and Triton code. Offsets, shapes, block sizes, scale counts, and group indices eventually become allocations, loop bounds, and memory addresses. A file can parse successfully while unsafe relationships between individually valid fields remain unchecked.
This talk maps that boundary across vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, TensorFlow Lite, ONNX, and quantization tooling. Through public findings, assigned CVEs, maintainer-merged fixes, and matched negative controls, I show recurring failure patterns involving extent disagreement, cardinality mismatch, and invalid index domains. A public GPTQModel case traces checkpoint-controlled state to an out-of-bounds device read at the production Triton dequantization launcher.
The point is not a crash count. It is a reproducible method for separating source hypotheses, loader reachability, native-sink evidence, and demonstrated impact. Attendees leave with a practical approach for treating model artifacts as untrusted input and auditing the native consumers in their own inference stacks.
Counter-UAS is a crowded field, and if your use case and budget can tolerate an expensive, exquisite, or bespoke system, or one that is permanently installed or mounted on a vehicle or trailer, there are many to choose from. Our interest is the low-SWaP (size, weight, and power) end of the counter-UAS space: something small and light that a person can easily carry and set up in minutes, or already has in their pocket. Over the past year we have been exploring how much passive EO detection, tracking, and classification of small UAS you can get out of USB cameras, single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi, and ordinary mobile phones. We wanted to understand what they can do, whether that holds up under real-world conditions, where their practical limits are, and how they fit as a layer in larger systems without depending on one.
This talk will demonstrate two threads of that work, both in progress. The first is synthetic training data: you cannot collect real imagery of every airframe you may need to recognize, so we render it, starting with 3D models of the airframes. We built those 3D models from photographs, technical drawings and blueprints, hand sketches, and plain verbal descriptions. All of them produced usable training data, and we will show what each gave us and what it cost. The second is the sensors themselves: fixed nodes built from a Pi, an AI accelerator, and a camera, plus an Android app that turns an ordinary phone into an acoustic-cued camera for detection and tracking. We will cover what we learned building and range-testing them, what we changed, and what we are taking back to the range in October.
Every Docker image tells a story, but most developers don't realise how much of that story is written in the .git directories they accidentally ship. After analyzing more than half a million image layers from Docker Hub, we found around 500,000 .git repositories embedded in public images: each one an unintended archive of source code, full commit history, author identities, and hard-coded secrets. Over 228,000 of those images reference private or deleted repositories that were never meant to be visible, now permanently accessible to anyone with a docker pull. This talk presents the methodology and findings of the first large-scale study of .git exposure in Docker Hub. We cover: how git commit metadata enables identity attribution at scale; how 497 self-hosted internal git hostnames, including those of a cloud infrastructure provider, a semiconductor manufacturer, and a GPU vendor, were revealed by images their own owners published; and how ephemeral CI tokens (GitHub Actions ghs_ and GitLab CI job tokens) embedded in git configs can be raced to confirm live access before they expire. We close with concrete mitigations any developer can apply today.
DOJO
This fast-paced 4-day course will make students familiar with reverse engineering Linux malware, starting off with a dense walk through of Linux OS internals and Linux binary analysis techniques, before jumping right in with common Linux malware. Quickly we'll work our way to advanced samples, targeted malware, Linux software protection techniques and packers. We will cover Go malware, Rust, and C++ samples, and explore recent rootkits targeting Linux.
The TEEPwn experience takes an offensive perspective and dives into the darker corners of TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) security. It’s designed with a system-level approach, where you will experience exploitation of powerful vulnerabilities specific for TEE technology. Moreover, it’s hands-on, well-guided and driven by an exciting jeopardy-style game format.
Join the esteemed senior security researcher and endpoint security engineer, as she takes you along a deep dive into the internals of the Windows 11 Operating System.
Covering Windows 11 “26H2”, the upcoming “27H1/2”, and Server 2025, you’ll unravel the secrets of how GRU bootkits, PLA software supply chain implants, NSA backdoors, and other kernel and firmware malware work. You’ll learn how they, and others, abuse various system functionality, obscure mechanisms, and data structures, in order to do their dirty work, and how you can too defend against it!
This is a four-day crash course in rapid prototyping for hardware hacking. You'll build upon the basics you already covered in an introductory hardware hacking course and will design and assemble, from scratch, multiple malicious hardware implants.
Learn how to use agentic AI to aid you as you attack and defend Kubernetes, Linux, and containers from Jay Beale, who has led development of the Kubernetes CTF at DEF CON, Bastille Linux, the Center for Internet Security's first Linux security benchmark, and the open source Kubernetes attack tool: Peirates. In this fully hands-on course, we’ll give you access to a computer in our cyber range, complete with an agentic AI framework, Kubernetes clusters, and capture the flag virtual machines, which you will attack and defend. You’ll get to keep the agentic AI framework, Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines. During the class, you’ll also have access to temporary cloud-based Kubernetes clusters.
Modern reverse engineering increasingly relies on automation, custom tooling, and agent-assisted workflows. But these approaches quickly run into limits when binaries actively resist analysis through control-flow obfuscation, virtualization, mixed Boolean-Arithmetic, and other transformations. This training teaches the practical deobfuscation workflows needed to break such protections and to make automated reverse-engineering workflows effective on real-world targets.
The course will present an in-depth description of the techniques implemented in modern malware to evade defenders and security products (such as AV, IPS, IDS, EDR), and how attackers design and operate their implants in order to ensure a prompt redeployment after a detection or a public disclosure by researchers or security vendors.
This class is designed to introduce students to the most effective tools and techniques for applying cutting edge deep learning based artificial intelligence to cybersecurity tasks. By leveraging AI driven automation, students will explore new ways to enhance security workflows, improve threat detection, and optimize vulnerability research. We will take a deep dive into modern AI architectures, focusing on how deep learning models can assist in areas such as reverse engineering and vulnerability research. Students will learn to solve real world cybersecurity challenges, integrating AI driven solutions into their daily operations. The course will provide hands-on experience with advanced agent driven security automation techniques. Through practical exercises, students will gain proficiency in using AI to automate security tasks. By the end of the course, attendees will have the skills and knowledge to incorporate deep learning based AI solutions into their cybersecurity workflows, enhancing both efficiency and effectiveness.
Learn how to use agentic AI to aid you as you attack and defend Kubernetes, Linux, and containers from Jay Beale, who has led development of the Kubernetes CTF at DEF CON, Bastille Linux, the Center for Internet Security's first Linux security benchmark, and the open source Kubernetes attack tool: Peirates. In this fully hands-on course, you'll get an x86 computer to keep, complete with an agentic AI framework, Kubernetes clusters, and capture the flag virtual machines, which you will attack and defend. You'll also get access to our cloud environment, allowing you to attack cloud-based Kubernetes clusters.
Learn how to use agentic AI to aid you as you attack and defend Kubernetes, Linux, and containers from Jay Beale, who has led development of the Kubernetes CTF at DEF CON, Bastille Linux, the Center for Internet Security's first Linux security benchmark, and the open source Kubernetes attack tool: Peirates. In this fully hands-on course, we’ll give you access to a computer in our cyber range, complete with an agentic AI framework, Kubernetes clusters, and capture the flag virtual machines, which you will attack and defend. You’ll get to keep the agentic AI framework, Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines. During the class, you’ll also have access to temporary cloud-based Kubernetes clusters.
Reverse engineering can have a brutal on-ramp. Binary Curious makes it more approachable. In this two-day, hands-on course, students use Ghidra together with hosted and local AI to explore unfamiliar software, make sense of decompiled code, recover useful names and structure, follow significant behavior, compare related code with BSim, and verify AI-generated claims against actual program evidence. The course is designed for security practitioners who understand basic programming concepts but do not need years of reverse-engineering experience. Students work in individual lab environments and finish by applying the complete workflow to a mystery binary and producing an evidence-supported technical assessment.
LLMs and classic SAST both find real bugs in your code. They also both produce noise, and they miss different things. This training is about building a pipeline that gets more out of each.
We start with why simple prompting underdelivers, then take SAST apart (sources, sinks, taint propagation) so you know where it misses and why. From there: using LLMs to improve SAST output, using context to improve LLM-driven scanning, and combining the two.
Then the hard part: cutting false positives with existing test frameworks, fuzzing harnesses, live test systems, and skeptical triage against source alone. We finish with remediation.
By the end of the training, you'll leave with a working pipeline design you can adapt to your own codebase and toolchain, not just a mental model of the ideas.
CanSecWest 2026
Call for Papers
Submit a presentation, workshop, panel or training for the conference.
First round CFP ends July 15.
Updates
The hotel block at the reduced rate is sold out but hope is not lost.

