Historic Hat Nod: Joanna Rutkowska — From Rootkits to Qubes!
For this week's article, i decided to dive into the early 2000's, and feature an amazing woman in the CyberSec space: Joanna Rutkowska
Joanna’s curiosity kicked in early... she was fascinated with the guts of operating systems before she was even out of primary school! She started learning x86 assembly on MS-DOS, (ahh, yes...the MS DOS-dayyys! ) ...later moved into Linux, and eventually focused on kernel programming, exploits, rootkits, and the sneaky ways malware can hide itself from the OS.
Then, in '06, she showed up at Black Hat with something called, "Blue Pill*.'*
The idea was reeeally nasty in a really clever way. Instead of malware simply hiding inside an operating system, Blue Pill used AMD’s new hardware virtualization technology to place a malicious hypervisor underneath it. (dang. i dunno about you, but this totally makes my skin crawl) The OScould keep running while the attacker occupied a layer below it. Rutkowska presented the research during her wonderfully titled talk, “Subverting Vista Kernel For Fun And Profit.”
Her work during this period became heavily associated with stealth malware, rootkits, virtualization attacks, and the uncomfortable question of whether a computer can ever reliably determine that it hasn’t already been compromised. Can it? ....can it tho?!
My fav part about her story, so far:
Rutkowska didn’t spend the bulk of her career only figuring out increasingly clever ways to break computers. In '07 she founded Invisible Things Lab, and a few years later she founded the project that became Qubes OS. Qubes took a very different approach to desktop security: instead of trusting one big operating-system environment with everything, split your digital life into isolated compartments. You know... Work over here. Banking over there. Random sketchy website wayyyy over thurrr. If one compartment gets compromised, the goal is to keep the attacker from automatically getting everything else.
The Qubes project dates back to '09, with its first public release arriving in April '10. More than fifteen years later, Qubes OS is still actively developed, and Rutkowska remains listed by the project as its founder and an advisor. (BTW, Ed Snowden uses AND publicly endorses Qubes OS!!!)
So, Joanna's career went thru a pretty epic arc:
Learn how operating systems work... figure out frightening new ways to compromise them..... start asking whether we should trust them so much in the first place .....build an operating system around that answer.
A massive Historic Hat Nod to Joanna Rutkowska for spending years thinking about what happens when we stop assuming the computer underneath us is trustworthy. (And for working for the good guys n gals, right? cuz....yeah. )
And also for naming a rootkit Blue Pill. (3 years after the Matrix "reloaded" and "revolutions" movies!)
Come on - that’s just excellent branding! :0)
Thanks for your eyes and time, readers... I'll see ya'll next week!