Margin Research Blog

Russia’s largest hacking conference, Positive Hack Days, recently took place in Moscow from Friday, May 19 to Saturday, May 20. The event was held at Gorky Park, a large park and cultural complex in Moscow, and split into an area freely open to the public and a village area

By Justin Sherman

One major difficulty of doing low-level security research is the lack of a testing and debugging environments. When testing regular userspace programs written in C and other high-level programming languages, there are a plethora of debugging tools like gdb to run, inspect, and modify a running process. Dynamically inspecting software

By Joe Lothan

One of the biggest challenges in many modern technologies is Entity Resolution, the practice of figuring out when two separate entities are actually the same thing, such as Git contributors. We leverage LLMs in our graph databases to solve this problem for GitHub contributors and more!

By Matthew Filbert

Russian internet company Yandex has been in the news recently, and not just because it’s one of the leading and most globally reaching technology firms in Russia. The company, founded as a search engine in 2000 and now worth billions of dollars, announced plans in November 2022 to potentially

By Justin Sherman

Margin Research’s Social Cyber project was originally hosted on a graph database (DB) technology called DGraph. In an unfortunate turn of events, DGraph ceased to exist as a company, requiring the Margin Research team to migrate our analysis tool to a different graph DB: Neo4J. This brought the question

By Matthew Filbert

So, you’ve heard about Cannoli, the high-performance tracing engine, but don’t know where to start. Perhaps you read the source code but don’t understand how to implement your analysis. Or maybe you’re someone who learns by example and finds inspiration in detailed walkthroughs. If so, this

By Ian Dupont

By Ian Palleiko

Reuters recently reported on November 16 that Pushwoosh, the maker of a software development kit (SDK), was falsely representing itself as an American company when in fact the technology company is based in Russia. Its code is reportedly used in thousands of Apple and Google app store applications, and the

By Justin Sherman

Description This blog details a C++ heap exploitation challenge written for CSAW CTF Finals 2022. This challenge incorporates an OOB heap write primitive to corrupt heap metadata, creating a use-after-free (UAF) by clobbering the C++ std::shared_ptr struct. The challenge is a x86-64 ELF binary linked against glibc v2.

By Ian Dupont

Through our work on SocialCyber, we map sanctioned Russian cyber actors, their contributions to the linux kernel, and the private-sector firms supporting Russian cyber operations.

By Justin Sherman