DSU professor to speak at DEF CON

July 31, 2019

Dr. Bramwell Brizendine, assistant professor of computer and cyber sciences, has been selected to speak at DEF CON 27 August 8-11 in Las Vegas.

DEF CON is a “hacker convention,” an event attended by students, industry professionals, and federal law enforcement agents. Typical attendance is over 20,000; the 2018 event hosted over 25,000.

Brizendine will present work from his recent doctoral dissertation, a software exploitation tool he created for Jump-oriented Programming (JOP), which he explains, “fills an unmet need for software exploitation.” The title of the talk is “The JOP ROCKET: A Supremely Wicked Tool for JOP Gadget Discovery, or What to Do If ROP Is Too Easy.”  Dr. Josh Stroschein, Brizendine’s dissertation advisor, will join as a co-speaker.

“One of the highlights for me is having a software exploitation tool that I spent countless long nights building and rebuilding being exposed to a wide audience through DEF CON,” Brizendine said. “When you create something like the JOP ROCKET, you are working in a vacuum, and you never know if others will ever even see or use it, so I am excited to see what users may think of it.”

Brizendine also plans to use the tool in the classroom, giving students “a chance to work with cutting-edge technology. This will “allow Ph.D. students to learn a more advanced exploit technique that otherwise would have been totally inaccessible to them.”

Other speakers at the event include students, research engineers, Congressional representatives, and government officials.