Bryce Boe

Yesterday, October 7, 2011, the graduate students of UCSB’s Computer Science department, including myself, hosted the 6th annual Graduate Student Workshop on Computing (GSWC). The workshop is a great opportunity for other students, faculty, and industry professionals to get an overview of the work performed by our department. Part of organizing the workshop is obtaining [...]

For the third year, I competed with team Shellphish in the Defcon quals. We pulled through with some amazing points at the end to finish in 8th place. My successful contributions, however, were really only with respect to Forensics 100 and 300. My write up for the following are below: Forensics 100 The forensics 100 [...]

The Usenix security deadline is quickly approaching, and that means finalizing everything on my research project. Therefore, today I wanted to quickly parallelize some of my analysis code to take advantage of the eight virtual processors on my machine. I previously wrote about python multiprocessing and keyboard interrupts, so the task of converting my code [...]

Each year the Security Lab at UCSB hosts the International Capture the Flag competition, an approximately eight-hour security competition pitting security groups at various universities around the world against each other. Last year I had the privilege of contributing significantly to the setup on the iCTF, and later publishing and presenting a paper, “Organizing Large [...]

Recently I’ve done a lot of work requiring heavy computation on large datasets. While python is not a great choice for speed, it can be extended by modules written in C for those speed critical moments. For such moments I always try to find solutions written as C modules. This approach works very well save [...]

VirusTotal is a web service that essentially performs a virus scan of an uploaded file, or url against many of the top virus scanners (see full list). I recently needed to submit over 100 binaries to VirusTotal, and being a computer scientist I knew this task, like many other things I do, could be perfectly [...]

Update 2011/02/03: Added commentary regarding Georges’s comment about this stackoverflow thread. Update 2011/01/28: There is an issue with this code when passing large objects through the queue. While the code listed below will work in most situations, consider using sentinels to indicate the end of jobs in your queue rather than relying on the Queue.Empty [...]

Edit 2010/08/27: I thought I should update this page stating that the AWS S3 Console was updated about a month ago with a feature to convert entire folders to/from Reduced Redundancy. Additionally the boto source has moved to GIT, thus a few changes are needed to run my script of the latest tree, however with [...]

I previously wrote about my preparation for leaving Facebook. This morning I have finally completed the last few things I wanted to do. Those last few things were to store the photo captions, photo comments, and photo tags for each photo downloaded. Yesterday, in order to extract this information from Facebook, I spent some time [...]

Edit: A bunch more DEFCON 18 write ups can be found at the vnSecurity site. This weekend I competed in the Defcon 18 Qualifiers with team Shellphish. We unfortunately only placed 15th, nonetheless, it was an exciting and challenging weekend. Below is my write up for the Forensics 200 challenge. I don’t recall the phrasing [...]