Alexander Sotirov
Encyclopedia
Computer security
Computer security is a branch of computer technology known as information security as applied to computers and networks. The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to...
researcher. He has been a researcher at Determina and VMware
VMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
.
He is well known for his discovery of the ANI
ANI (file format)
The ANI file format is a graphics file format used for animated mouse cursors on the Microsoft Windows operating system.The format is based on the Microsoft RIFF file format, which is used as a container for storing the individual frames of the animation.- File structure :Animated cursors contain...
browser vulnerability as well as the so-called Heap Feng Shui technique for exploiting heap buffer overflows
Heap overflow
A heap overflow is a type of buffer overflow that occurs in the heap data area. Heap overflows are exploitable in a different manner to that of stack-based overflows. Memory on the heap is dynamically allocated by the application at run-time and typically contains program data...
in browsers. In 2008, he presented research at Black Hat
Black Hat Briefings
The Black Hat Conference is a computer security conference that brings together a variety of people interested in information security. Representatives of federal agencies and corporations attend along with hackers. The Briefings take place regularly in Las Vegas, Barcelona and Tokyo...
showing how to bypass memory protection safeguards in Windows Vista. Together with a team of industry security researchers and academic cryptographers, he published research on creating a rogue certificate authority
Certificate authority
In cryptography, a certificate authority, or certification authority, is an entity that issues digital certificates. The digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate...
by using collisions
Hash collision
Not to be confused with wireless packet collision.In computer science, a collision or clash is a situation that occurs when two distinct pieces of data have the same hash value, checksum, fingerprint, or cryptographic digest....
of the MD5
MD5
The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm is a widely used cryptographic hash function that produces a 128-bit hash value. Specified in RFC 1321, MD5 has been employed in a wide variety of security applications, and is also commonly used to check data integrity...
cryptographic hash function in December 2008.
Sotirov is a founder and organizer of the Pwnie award
Pwnie award
The Pwnie Awards recognize both extreme excellence and incompetence in the field of information security. Winners are selected by a committee of security industry luminaries from nominations collected from the information security community...
s and was on the program committee of the 2008 Workshop On Offensive Technologies (WOOT '08).