Photo of Brendan Dolan-Gavitt

Columbia University, CEPSR 604
(617) 913-9060
brendan@cs.columbia.edu

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt's Research Home Page

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Biography

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the IDS Lab. My interests lie in the area of systems security, and in particular developing automated techniques for understanding computing systems and using that understanding to develop novel defenses. I am also active in the rapidly growing field of memory forensics, and have published papers on extracting forensically relevant information from images of RAM. I received my PhD from Georgia Tech in August 2014, and my B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Wesleyan University in 2006. I also spent two years working as an information security analyst and researcher for the MITRE Corporation.

Beginning Fall 2015, I will be joining the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering as an Assistant Professor in CS.

If you need to get in touch privately, please use my PGP key.

Publications

Refereed

Unrefereed

Press

Talks

Dynamic Analysis Kung-Fu with PANDA
Presented at RECON 2014 in Montreal. [ Video ] [ Slides ]

Software

PANDA: Platform for Architecture-Neutral Dynamic Analysis
PANDA is the Platform for Architecture-Neutral Dynamic Analysis. It is a platform based on QEMU 1.0.1 and LLVM 3.3 for performing dynamic software analysis, abstracting architecture-level details away with a clean plugin interface. Particularly notable features include Android platform emulation and support for deterministic record and replay. It is currently being developed in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Georgia Tech, and Northeastern University.
Virtuoso
Virtuoso is a system for automatically generating tools that can be used to introspect into virtual machines or extract information from memory images. It consists of a dynamic tracing system that records the execution of an in-guest program, and an analysis and translation component that converts the traces into a compact, out-of-guest program that computes the same result. More details can be found in our 2011 IEEE Security and Privacy paper.
Virtual Address Descriptor Tools
The VAD tools are a set of scripts for working with Virtual Address Descriptor structures in dumps of Windows physical memory to provide detailed information about a process's memory allocations to a forensic investigator. (Note: the functionality of these tools has now been implemented in Volatility, and their use is no longer recommended.)
PDBparse
PDBparse is a GPL-licensed library for parsing Microsoft PDB files. Support for these is already available within Windows through the Debug Interface Access API, however, this interface is not usable on other operating systems. PDB files provide a way to access debugging information about programs compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio, and can enable interesting applications such as extracting the Windows kernel data structures or finding non-exported kernel global vairables, all without access to the source.
Volatility
Along with AAron Walters and several others, I help develop and maintain Volatility, an open-source (GPL-licensed) memory forensics framework. Volatility can do a lot of really cool things with memory images, from listing processes and threads, to viewing open network connections, to reconstructing executable files out of memory. I have also written some small extensions that allow it to interpret the memory of live virtual machines under Xen, using the XenAccess library.