FOSSMeet 2017

FOSSMeet is an annual event at NIT Calicut that brings together the Free and Open Source Community from around the country.

FOSSMeet is the annual Free and Open source software meet at NIT Calicut. We are inviting proposals for talks and workshops at FOSSMeet 2017.

What we are looking for

Through FOSSMeet, we intend to get the attendees, mostly students, get started with the development and usage of free software. You may propose to conduct a lecture, demo, tutorial, workshop, discussion or panel at FOSSMeet. If the contents of your session is the ‘I am feeling lucky’ result of some Google search, there is low probability that it’ll be accepted. Same applies to proposals titled ‘The absolute beginner introduction to X’ and others on a similar line. On the other hand, if your talk is on some obscure, albeit important, free software project that will go over most students head, this might not be the best platform to deliver that talk. There are always exceptions and we leave that to your judgement. If our audience wants it, we’ll try our best to accommodate it. Of course, if you find people interested in your proposal, you can always call a BoF. We are all for BoF’s! :)

Take the above with a pinch of salt. They are no s̶t̶r̶i̶c̶t̶ ̶r̶u̶l̶e̶s̶, only guidelines. All your proposals are welcome and we celebrate every single one that we receive! :D Looking forward to see you folks here.

Audience

Your audience (mostly) comprises of smart, above average, GNU/Linux aware students.

Important dates

Call for proposals opens: Oct 27, 2016
Proposal submission deadline: Jan 15, 2017
Proposal acceptance: Jan 20, 2017
Presentation upload: Feb 15, 2017

Contact Us:

For more information about speaking and proposals, contact speakers@fossmeet.in.

Hosted by

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software, conducted at National Institute of Technology, Calicut. The funnel is a space for proposals and voting on events. more

Siddharth Muralee

@tr3x

A Deep Dive into Code ( An Intro to Reverse Engineering)

Submitted Nov 27, 2016

Reverse Engineering is the process of taking a program’s binary, analyzing its functions and information flow to figure out what the program is meant to do. The usual reasons to reverse engineer a piece of software are to recreate the program, to build something similar to it, to exploit its vulnerabilities and strengthen its defenses.
Learning how to reverse engineer a software is a skill that would benefit a programmer in a variety of ways. Being able to understand how a software works, by peeling down its layers to understand in a better manner what makes it tick. We will be reaching deep down into the code to figure out its mysteries. This session will also include an introduction to Capture the Flag competitions(CTFs), Assembly language, Memory management and The GNU Debugger.

Outline

Why Reverse Engineering is important for a programmer(Is it Relevant for a FOSS enthusiast)?
Reverse Engineering is definitely a great skill for a programmer as it gives a proper understanding of the inner workings of a software. This helps in debugging the code, finding bugs and optimize the code in a better manner. The ability to look into the code of any Software at any point of time is definitely a plus point for a programmer, especially a FOSS enthusiast.

Who all use the skill of reverse engineering?
Reverse engineering can be used to find weak points of a program also called vulnerabilities which they can exploit. Computer security experts of an organization use reverse engineering to locate vulnerabilities with the intention to strengthen the defenses there.
Software companies with competing products reverse engineer their competitors’ programs to find out where and how improvements can be made on their own products. Some companies use reverse engineering when they don’t have similar products yet, to create products of their own. Those who intend to build their own products based on an existing one often prefer reverse engineering, over creating from scratch because once the parts and the dependencies are identified, the process of reconstructing tends to be much easier.

Why would anyone waste time understanding Assembly language and Debugging is that really necessary?
Albeit it being the toughest and the a very basic language, it can be used to understand the source code of softwares with an additional advantage of being able to find out bugs and errors in the programs that a person writes. The GNU debugger can be used to set breakpoints while a program execution is done, meaning you can really stop a program while running, view what all is happening and resume it whenever you want. And hence it will be very useful for the newbies when they start contributing to a project.

What are Capture the Flag competitions?
Capture the Flag competitions or CTFs as they are better known is a special kind of information security competition which has attracted huge attention world wide. Security is known to be a field with 0% unemployment and its importance increasing day by day as more of the world becomes digitalized.

The Session will be in four parts
1. A basic introduction about Assembly Language,GNU Debugger and CTFs.
2. Debugging and finding errors in small C and C++ programs.
3. Live demo of reversing a small password protected 32-bit Linux executable.
4. Participants can try their hand at reversing a simple math based 32-bit Linux executable.

Requirements

Participants should bring their laptops with any Linux Os installed.

Speaker bio

I am currently pursuing a B.Tech in Computer Science at Amrita School of Engineering , Amritapuri.
I am a Foss and Security Enthusiast, mainly into Reverse Engineering, Binary Exploitation and Cryptography.
I am a member of team Bi0s. We are currently the top CTF team in India ahead of IITs, NITs and BITS. Currently ranked 65th in the world by ratings given by CTFtime.org.

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Hosted by

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software, conducted at National Institute of Technology, Calicut. The funnel is a space for proposals and voting on events. more