ThinkstScapes Research Roundup - Q1 - 2025

ThinkstScapes Q1’25 Putting it into practice Homomorphic Encryption across Apple features Rehan Rishi, Haris Mughees, Fabian Boemer, Karl Tarbe, Nicholas Genise, Akshay Wadia, and Ruiyu Zhu [Code] [Paper] [Video] Beyond the Hook: A Technical Deep Dive into Modern Phishing Methodologies Alexandre Nesic [Blog] How to Backdoor Large Language Models Shrivu Shankar [Blog] [Code] Buccaneers of the Binary: Plundering Compiler Optimizations for Decompilation Treasure Zion Leonahenahe Basque [Code] [Video] Software Screws Around, Reverse Engineering Finds Out: How Independent, Adversarial Research Informs Government Regulation Andy Sellars and Michael A. Specter [Video] [Website] Understanding things all the way down PhantomLiDAR: Cross-modality Signal Injection Attacks against LiDAR Zizhi Jin, Qinhong Jiang, Xuancun Lu, Chen Yan, Xiaoyu Ji, and Wenyuan Xu [Paper] [Demo Videos] Full-stack Reverse Engineering of the Original Microsoft Xbox Markus Gaasedelen [Video] Wallbleed: A Memory Disclosure Vulnerability in the Great Firewall of China Shencha Fan, Jackson Sippe, Sakamoto San, Jade Sheffey, David Fifield, Amir Houmansadr, Elson Wedwards, and Eric Wustrow [Paper] Scaling software (in)security Low-Effort Denial of Service with Recursion Alexis Challande and Brad Swain [Paper] [Video] Is this memory safety here in the room with us? Thomas Dullien (Halvar Flake) [Slides] [Video] How to gain code execution on millions of people and hundreds of popular apps Eva [Blog] Node is a loader Tom Steele [Blog] Mixing up Public and Private Keys in OpenID Connect deployments Hanno Böck [Blog] [Code] Nifty sundries Will It Run? Fooling EDRs With Command Lines Using Empirical Data Wietze Beukema [Tool site] [Code] [Video] Homoglyph-Based Attacks: Circumventing LLM Detectors Aldan Creo [Paper] [Code] [Video] 28 Months Later - The Ongoing Evolution of Russia's Cyber Operations The Grugq [Slides] [Podcast interview] ‘It's Not Paranoia If They're Really After You’: When Announcing Deception Technology Can Change Attacker Decisions Andrew Reeves and Debi Ashenden [Paper] Off-Path TCP Hijacking in Wi-Fi Networks: A Packet-Size Side Channel Attack Ziqiang Wang, Xuewei Feng, Qi Li, Kun Sun, Yuxiang Yang, Mengyuan Li, Ganqiu Du, Ke Xu, and Jianping Wu [Paper] [Code]