Creator of IDA Pro disassembler to speak at PHDays 8

The keynote speaker at PHDays 8 will be developer Ilfak Guilfanov, known for authoring the IDA Pro disassembler and Hex-Rays decompiler.

His initial brush with fame came in 2005, when on December 31 he released an unofficial patch for the Windows Metafile vulnerability. Microsoft's official patch appeared only a week later, on January 5, 2006.

However, Ilfak's crowning accomplishment is IDA Pro. This disassembler is familiar to reverse engineers, virus analysts, and security experts all around the world—in other words, nearly anyone who has to take apart other people's code. Entire books have been written about IDA Pro, including by Kris Kaspersky and Chris Eagle, the latter publishing a work with the subtitle "The Unofficial Guide to the World's Most Popular Disassembler."

He later developed Hex-Rays, a decompiler based on IDA Pro, for analyzing program code.

Currently Ilfak manages his own company, Hex-Rays SA, which distributes IDA Pro and Hex-Rays. At PHDays he will give a talk entitled "Decompiler internals: Microcode" in which he will cover the history of the creation of the microcode that is used in the decompiler Hex-Rays, the microcode's features, and issues that arise when decompiling programs.

Get your ticket for Positive Hack Days to hear from this programming pioneer in person! If you're interested in speaking from the same podium as big-name security experts, hurry up—the Call For Papers closes on March 10. Topics and guidelines are available on the event website.