[Dailydave] Hacking software is lame -- try medical research...

[J.M. Seitz]

Kristian, 

> If we consider ourselves decent "hackers", why don't we put 
> our efforts toward helping cure this and other diseases 
> rather than some very simple programming vulnerability?  Is 
> it because then we would have to reinvent a whole new slew of 
> tools and re-orient/re-educate ourselves to be successful?  

This is something I have pondered often, my mother was diagnosed with
Alzheimers last year at the age of 54, which is extremely young to have the
onset of dementia, she faces 20+ years of slowly losing portions of her
brain while maintaining a perfectly healthy body. As I worked my way through
vuln-dev, fuzzing, RE'ing, etc. and I read some of the brilliant papers from
infosec thought leaders, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to
gather a group of them together and hack Alzheimers. There are lots of
correlating things we could all do much the same way: learn some physiology
(OS internals, x86 assembly), determine how high-level systems interact with
the low level systems (data flow analysis, run tracing, debugging),find the
genetic or physiological weakspots (exploit development) and determine a
means of detection, prevention (developer education, NX bit,binary
patching).

The unfortunate thing about Alzheimer's is that there is no way to even
properly diagnose it until post-mortem (crash dump?) and no drugs are
covered by any health plans, as they don't even know if the drugs have any
effect on it.

But, we do what we can and what we enjoy, it's what helps us all to
sometimes escape the harsh reality of the unchangeable things in the real
world. Maybe Damian could port ImmunityDebugger to work with a GE MRI
machine? I will ask him.....

JS
jms at bughunter.ca