ghidra-delinker-extension and boricj do ACM CCS 2025
What?
- ACM (Association for Computing Machinery): the world’s largest society for the study of computing.
- SIGSAC (Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control): one of 38 groups inside of the ACM, this one is focused on cybersecurity.
- ACM CCS (Computer and Communications Security): the flagship annual conference of SIGSAC.
- SURE workshop (Software Understanding and Reverse-Engineering): one of many, many workshops held in the ACM CCS conference, this one is brand-spanking new in the 2025 edition.
Ergo:
No, I meant WHAT THE FUCK?
I don’t know!
I was shitposting in a Discord server and next thing I know, I’m standing next to a poster in Taipei, showcasing to world-class cybersecurity experts Mad Max-driven development!
I’d better start over from the beginning. I assume you already know about my delinking work; if not, you may imagine Doctor Frankenstein, but with bits instead of gibs.
Act 1: the Universe conspires to make me do something
One does not simply stumble into the SURE workshop
Right after we left off last time, I casually stumbled upon an invite link to the SURE Discord server whilst idling around the decomp.me Discord server, as one does.
There, I saw a call for papers and this fateful statement was uttered in a Discord channel by a stark raving lunatic yours truly:
Ooh, they have a workshop upcoming and they want non-academics to submit papers? I’ve never had an opportunity to melt down the brains of lots of academics at once before…
… and people actually cheered me for it.
That should’ve been the first hint that something was about to go horribly right.
What’s a paper?
The call for papers was sent out two months before the deadline and a month had already passed by the time I saw it. I mean, I’m quite adept at burning down computer science literature, how hard can it be to write some?
Incredibly hard.
My initial plans for a long (12 page) paper with quantitative case studies were quickly crushed by time constraints. I cut down the paper down to the bone and then some into a short (6 page) paper with an introduction to the topic and two qualitative case reports, working on it on a month’s worth of spare time.
It took all of the combined might of Gemini and Copilot to massage my first draft into something that vaguely looks like academic vernacular. Because if you haven’t picked up on this by now, my usual style of writing is anything but academic.
So the day arrives, the paper… exists I guess and I submit it, exhausted and deeply unsatisfied by it. Surely, the worst they can say is —
Although we were unable to accept your work for publication, the PC still found your work interesting and worth broader discussion at the workshop. We want to invite you to present your work as a poster at the SURE Workshop on October 13th. We clarify that this work will not appear in proceedings, but we think it can still bring value to authors.
— get over here?
WHAT.
I have received an invitation from a workshop’s program committee, to present a poster at one of the world’s most prestigious academic cybersecurity conferences… on account of a so-called ‘paper’ where I describe the butchering of computer programs into unholy chimeras as a hobby.
This is the kind of world-class conference with a $1810 entry ticket, happening in a convention center whose total area is measured in hectares, attended by professional members of an academic, industrial or state organization, all expenses paid in a five star hotel room with a king bed and a marble bathroom.
You’re attending because you have either managed to land one of the accepted papers (with is by itself an achievement given the exclusive acceptance rate) or you have business to attend alongside the brightest of the field. You don’t just happen to receive an invitation from a program committee to present anything there as a hobbyist. That just, like, doesn’t happen, ever.
There’s only so much I can try to convey how this is utterly impossible in one go, so we’ll set that aside for now.
As for the paper itself, it received two positive and one negative reviews. The main criticisms were:
- The paper failed to state anything about the availability of the tooling (because I’m a doofus that thought anonymization for a double-blind review meant when in doubt, redact and omit everything).
- The paper fails to demonstrate this approach is applicable to multiple architecture and platforms (my case studies used Windows and Linux platforms, but only on x86).
- The evaluation is weak, containing only two targets and has no quantifiable data.
- The paper missed closely related prior art.
Turns out academia had done this idea about a decade ago, with the following papers:
I missed that work, partly because when I looked around I only thought about object files and not assembly as a suitable file format.
I will not put this attempt of a paper online. I already thought that it was very weak as a piece of scientific literature before the review. Now that I have the full context on how it fared, bringing it up to a satisfactory standard would take a massive amount of work. Like, a master’s thesis amount of work.
Oh crap, I need papers/international cards/bags/clothes/travel supplies/…
Right, so I’ve basically received an invitation from Hogwarts, school of Witchcraft and Wizardry, to attend their flagship conference. Oh, and it’s in two months at the other side of the planet, whereas I’ve never ventured further away than the next county in my entire adult life… and groaning audibly whenever I do so.
I mean, I don’t have a passport and as a chaotic individual I harbor a deeply-ingrained distrust of bureaucracy. Surely, the authorities will —
| Milestone | Driving license | Identity card | Passport |
|---|---|---|---|
| Requested on | 2025-08-17 | 2025-08-21 | 2025-08-21 |
| In production | 2025-08-19 | 2025-08-26 | 2025-08-27 |
| Arrived on | 2025-09-01 | 2025-09-02 | 2025-09-02 |
— possibly break the speed record of processing on all documents?
That’s less than two weeks, even for my identity card which was renewed for a reason (still valid but requesting the new format) that is explicitly deprioritized. Supposedly, it should’ve taken anywhere from four to six weeks…
Now I’m beginning to believe that this is a fixed point in time, and that failure to attend would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire Universe.
The rest of the required paperwork and supplies were sourced at a leisurely pace (not buying supplies without a conference registration, can’t pay the conference registration fee or hotel deposit without a Visa Premier card, not getting the card until I heard back from my employer…). In hindsight, I could’ve reordered my acquisitions and registrations to better spread the amount of outgoing money.
I can’t believe I’m making academic art
So I said yes to presenting an academic poster. That means I actually need to have something to hang on a panel. Seeing how bad I’m at writing academic papers, surely me making an academic poster will —
— turn out decent?
The irony that all of the time that I’ve spent doodling… art… during my tertiary education in class, turning out to be a useful skill in an academical context eight years later, is not lost on me. Though I must admit that digital, vector and serious art are all new to me. I also had no idea what an academic poster was supposed to look like, nor did I know what was the meta around them.
It took me six week-ends to wrangle Inkscape into doing something I consider passable (why oh why doesn’t it have geometric constraints?). Yet, despite the amount of work that I’ve put into this, I still hate lots of things about it:
- The headings for each section are basically background noise, they simply don’t pop out.
- It lacks breathing space on the vertical axis, it’s stacked too tightly.
- The second and third diagrams of the first row don’t quite work, as people need to do a double take to actually understand what goes on.
- The diagrams on the second row aren’t complete, self-contained explanations; the linking one doesn’t show relocation resolving and the delinking one doesn’t show how references turn into relocations, but I don’t know how to draw that without overloading them.
- The second diagram of the third row doesn’t work; it’s supposed to have the horizontal axis showing time and the vertical axis showing decompilation progress, but it fails to convey both intuitively.
- The links aren’t underlined and in blue to evoke hyperlinks.
- The join arrows of the first and third diagrams of the third row are so goddamn ugly.
You may think that I’m really hard on myself. It’s the downside of developing an artist’s eye: you spot all of the mistakes in your own work and you are unable to fix them, regardless how many times you’re redoing these parts. Oh, and the longer you stare at your own work, the more mistakes you notice…
I can’t believe I’m making business art
I figured I should probably get a business card, as it sounded like something professionals would do. So, I spent another afternoon the week before the departure coming up with this:
My requirements are that I don’t want to order a new print anytime soon, so I carefully designed it so that it contains all of my information that isn’t subject to change, excluding things like job title or employer. I don’t see a point in putting my face on it and although putting my online avatar (an absurdly adorable picture of my cat’s face) was tempting, I’ve decided to put a QR code containing a vCard instead.
I ordered a print of 250 cards on bamboo paper (90% bamboo, 10% cotton). Not because it is ecological, but because it’s unconventional and it gave a look and feel reminiscent of static, analog noise.
A trip to the other side of the world
As the start of the conference draws near, so does my round-trip to Taiwan. This is my outbound journey:
This is my return trip:
The stage is set, all that remains to do is survive enjoy the ride.
After all, it’s not like my first trip abroad as an adult is to the other side of the planet, or that the last time I flew on an airplane was back when I was a kid, or that I’m heading out there all alone.
No, that’s a brilliant idea.
Act 2: a heretic walking on holy ground
Triple-checking that I didn’t put my trusty customized N°09 carbon steel Opinel knife in my pocket or cabin luggage, because apparently you can’t really Crocodile Dundee on a commercial airplane anymore, I get all the way to Taipei, unsure of what I’m about to walk into.
This isn’t your typical conference report. I won’t cite here papers or people in particular because I am not a journalist. Instead, I’ll give a meta-report, my general vibe about it.
I’ll set the keynote talks aside, as they were done by engaging and experienced people. They were mostly about giving context regarding a field or a topic, whether for the conference or the workshop. I’ve learned a lot of useful information from them, they were really enlightening and interesting.
Day 1: pre-conference workshops
I hung out in the SURE workshop all day. It had a lot of attendance (especially for a first edition), never dipping below 40 people and at times the room was nearly completely packed with ~80 people. Overall it was a pleasant experience, quite interesting and insightful, a gentle introduction to the world of academic conferences.
Poster session
The SURE workshop poster presentation session lasted 90 minutes, concurrently with lunch; I first spent 45 minutes having lunch because I’m French, then I spent 45 minutes in front of my poster, talking non-stop to about 15 people in total.
My poster was an absolute hit, at least within the context of a workshop as it had only three posters, a deliberate choice by the program committee for a focused session. The plastic print was absolutely immaculate and looked even better in person than I hoped for. I’ve had people taking pictures of the poster just because they liked the design that much, before even actually reading it. Some of them showed said pictures to their doctoral advisor, who in turn promptly demanded that their next poster shall look like that.
The main practical problem about my poster during the poster session was that nobody saw the QR codes at the bottom, unless I pointed them out. That whole bottom row was poorly designed in the first place…
Day 2-4: main conference
I’ve mostly stayed in the software security track, mostly because I was too lazy to actually pick-and-choose what I ought to see.
Paper presentations
Imagine sitting all day in a classroom and having a marathon of 15-minute talks on a wide variety of topics given by inexperienced speakers.
I don’t want to be harsh, but most of them were grueling to watch. Stressed-out undergraduates or doctoral students, with thick accents and varying degrees of English fluency, their doctoral advisor most likely in the audience, armed with a set of passable but unremarkable PowerPoint slides…
I have the academic and technical background to understand what was being presented in the software security track, at least at a high level. I don’t have the energy to immerse myself in eighteen or so different topics of research papers in one day, if my brain is already cooked after trying to decode the first set of six talks. It takes a lot of effort to do so and once your mental energy is depleted by that task, you just mentally check out for a couple of minutes.
I actually fell back into my old habits and started doodling on a notepad between my bursts of note-taking, as if I was back in school. Months since I last attempted a drawing, years since I last completed one and by the end of the conference I had a dozen of them.
Somehow, I’ve rekindled a lost hobby of mine. I didn’t see that coming. My drawings were also a hit with the attendees, especially at the bar later on.
It still was worthwhile to attend them, as I’ve learned quite a lot on topics I usually don’t have much experience in. It is however a challenge to stay focused in these conditions all day for those of us like me, who don’t consume caffeinated beverages.
Poster session
The main track poster session was quite unlike the one from the workshop (and not only because it showcased over 40 posters). By that point, I had watched the Better Posters Generation 1 video and all I will say is that it was spot-on, except that the noise in that cavernous room was also deafening.
The one poster that I found really good and effective was from the people behind WireTap and they also did a demo exhibit… only for me to find out that they were not part of the best poster award competition. I wondered how my poster would’ve fared in this session, but alas it wasn’t meant to be, for mine was confined in a workshop and not on display here.
Day 5: post-conference workshop
I didn’t attend, except to eat at the lunch buffet. By that point, I had already developed a really nasty cough, probably because my immune system hadn’t encountered a real challenge in a long time, due to me never adventuring further away than 150 kilometers from home in the past decade. I just chilled, visiting Taipei Civic Plaza and Taipei 101, hanging out with some of the attendees.
…b-but I really wanted a conference report!
Fine, but I’ll do it the lazy way.
I’ve kept notes throughout the conference, but they are basically undecipherable except by me and the Gemini 2.5 Pro chat conversation that contains all of the history regarding my attendance, dating back to me accepting the invitation. I therefore asked it to give a summary, which was structured around the three themes you can read below.
The Unrelenting Arms Race of Automation (Fueled by AI/LLMs)
This was arguably the dominant narrative, set by the opening keynote tracing vulnerability research from manual art to autonomous systems driven by competitions like the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge. Fuzzing remains a primary weapon, now being enhanced with AI/LLMs, Rust-specific awareness, and kernel parameter integration. Defensively, AI is being used for tasks like packer detection, and the fight against obfuscation continues with new synthesis techniques. The field is increasingly characterized by this rapid, automated back-and-forth.
Hardware as the New Foundation
A significant trend is the shift “down the stack,” leveraging hardware features as trust anchors for security. Capabilities, particularly CHERI, were prominent, used for memory safety, sandboxing, and even de-privileging GPU drivers. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and confidential computing were major focus areas, applied to securing I/O for LLMs, defending against firmware attacks, and creating attestable build pipelines. Other hardware interactions, from CPU caches and SSDs to ARM’s MTE and DMA, were also explored as both attack surfaces and defense mechanisms.
The Quest for Correct Abstractions & Bridging the Human Gap
Echoing the SURE workshop’s mission to close the “software understanding gap”, there was a clear focus on finding better ways to manage complexity and ensure correctness. This ranged from the highly formal (mechanizing GDPR compliance with temporal logic, creating provably correct parsers) to the practical (improving function signature recovery). A recurring pain point was the “human gap”—developers writing vulnerable code due to fundamental misunderstandings of underlying platforms (like Windows file systems) or security boundaries (like Kubernetes implicit permissions). The SURE panel explicitly debated the need for new, higher-level abstractions beyond source code itself.
What about delinking?
There has been three very distinct responses:
- From people unfamiliar with the technique, I looked like Hackerman, performing awe-inspiring black magic heresy while pissing all over CS 101. In particular, I’ve noticed that academics coming from Asian institutions seemed to be especially impressed by it.
- From people who were familiar with the inner workings of toolchains, the response was less astonishment and more “ooh, neat party trick”. I guess it really shows that once you’ve mastered the rules, you then know how to break them and get away with it.
- From people who actually co-authored the paper on binary reassembling, the consensus was that this technique was academically speaking obsolete, as focus shifted to decompilation and then recompilation, which promised a more general solution, unshackled by instruction sets or ABI constraints.
As it turns out, by the time you’ve actually solved split relocations, you’ve already created several pieces of a decompiler.
That doesn’t mean that this technique is not useful anymore or not worthy of further study; on the contrary, the fact that I had a growing and enthusiastic user-base in the video game decompilation community was especially of interest.
Act 3: the Universe decides to toy with me
With the conference finished, I figured that the worst was behind me and that I was home-free.
How wrong I was. The real fun was about to begin.
For want of a dollar
Come Saturday morning, how hard can it be to check out of a hotel?
- My Visa Premier card was declined when I tried to settle my bill.
- I then tried three different ATMs from three different banks around the hotel, running around in +30°C sunny, humid weather to no avail.
- I then tried to call the Service Premier emergency number on the back of my card, but my French SIM card doesn’t work in Taiwan (as in, it’s not even connecting to the cell network).
- I then ask the hotel reception to call that number, which connects after a couple of tries (missed the +33 prefix, forgot to take out the leading 0 on an international call…).
- The operator informed me that my card had been blocked due to suspicions of fraud activity and the bill was also slightly over my remaining monthly payment limit (all €9000 of it). They needed to confirm my identity… by calling my mobile phone number, which doesn’t work in Taiwan.
- Being unable to confirm my identity, I am then informed that I would need to call my local bank branch so that they can sort this out, but it was 6 AM in France and by the time they would open three hours later, I had to be at the Taoyuan International Airport.
Only after explaining to the hotel staff that I was shit out of luck and needed them to suggest a solution, did they proceed to simply use my deposit made during check-in, as it was more than enough to cover my bill.
What did I learn from this?
- Don’t just have more cash than you think you will need, have an amount as stupidly large as the Universe can be.
- Don’t just use a card twice in a foreign country on the other side of the planet to settle four digit bills.
- Next time, just ask to use the deposit when the card declines.
While being rattled by the experience, even stuck with a non-functional card I still had around NT$4000 and €70 in cash when I left the hotel. It’s not a whole lot, but with a NT$1400 taxi fare to the Taoyuan International Airport as the only foreseeable mandatory expense until my sister grabs me at the Lyon Saint-Exupéry Airport, I figured I was probably fine as long as nothing else went majorly wrong.
I can’t believe I’ve managed to keep it together though this mess. And here I thought that being aloof through immigration with the Taiwan Arrival Card was bad enough…
For want of a transit
Remember that short layover at the Hong Kong International airport?
- Boarding was supposed to happen at 6:10 PM, it got delayed to 6:25 PM.
- Departure was supposed to happen at 6:40 PM, it got delayed to 7:15 PM.
- Take-off at 7:35 PM.
- Landing at 8:55 PM.
- Plane reached the gate at 9:10 PM (crap, gotta pee).
- Got out of the plane at 9:20 PM.
- Passed passport check at 9:25 PM.
- Passed security check at 9:30 PM (crap, I need to drink all of the water in my half-liter bottle).
- Reached the gate at 9:35 PM.
- Exited the toilets at 9:40 PM (crap, I really gotta stop filling that bottle).
- Boarded the plane at 9:45 PM.
- Boarding complete at 10:00 PM, with the gate originally set to close at 10:10 PM.
I had originally 100 minutes to perform this layover. The delay stripped 45 minutes off of that, leaving me with less than one hour to speedrun it, which is officially not enough to do it.
Thankfully I didn’t have to find out what would’ve happened should things have gone further awry (more delays, jam and/or issues at the checks…), but that was not a fun experience to do on a full bladder.
For want of a different kind of transit
Something quite minor, but I’ve made the mistake of eating a yogurt served during breakfast at the end of my HKG-CDG trip. Apparently in the last 15 years since I last ate one, yogurts are no longer welcome in my stomach.
Now that was queasy but manageable… if I hadn’t filled again my water bottle and had to go through another security check after disembarking, drinking yet another half liter of water. It ultimately stayed in throughout the travel area, but not without a fight.
How?
I don’t know!
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m chaos incarnate. I’m the kind of person who ports the NetBSD kernel to the PlayStation 2 while hopped up on anesthetics, after having all of my wisdom teeth pulled out, because I was too smashed to do anything else.
This entire sequence of events, from stumbling upon a call for papers seemingly at random all the way to presenting a poster at ACM CCS 2025 in Taiwan, was so ludicrous that it might as well be taken from a Hollywood movie. This was madness and I have no idea how attempting to decompile a PlayStation video game could’ve possibly snowballed out of control up to that point…
My only explanation is chaos. Pure, unadulterated chaos.
There is so much more to this story than just me performing a live rendition of Crocodile Dundee in the world of software engineering. However, this touches a range of topics that I don’t want to get into on this blog, for a variety of reasons.
Maybe one day I’ll release the Director’s cut of it, but it’s doubtful that I would ever do it publicly. I did share some of these details with the attendees and they were absolutely astounded. As in, the kind of incredible story that you can’t made up, even if you tried.
How much?
Well, that trip was entirely self-funded for reasons that I won’t go into and I did keep track of my expenses. So, what does attending ACM CSS 2025 as a hobbyist cost?
| Category | Description | EUR | NT$ | US$ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conference | ACM CCS 2025 Full package registration | -1,552.32 | -1,810.00 | |
| Transport | Air France Airfare, taxes and options | -2,920.17 | ||
| Transport | Air France Airfare insurance | -150.00 | ||
| Supplies | Amazon Travel Supplies (bags, adapter, etc.) | -275.40 | ||
| Supplies | VistaPrint 250 Business Cards Priority shipping | -54.53 | ||
| Personal | Clothes | -2,213.00 | ||
| Personal | Fnac Sony WH-1000MX6 Headphones | -419.99 | ||
| Food & Drinks | Lyon–Saint Exupéry Airport Sandwich | -6.50 | ||
| Currency | Bank of Taiwan EUR to NT$ conversion | -300.00 | +10,401 | |
| Currency | Bank of Taiwan Conversion charge | -30.00 | ||
| Supplies | Taiwan Mobile SIM Card (7 days unlimited data) 5G Short-term Prepaid Card | -800.00 | ||
| Transport | Taxi TPE to Grand Hyatt Taipei | -1,500.00 | ||
| Accommodation | Grand Hyatt Taipei 6 night reservation deposit (authorization hold) | -1,695.97 | -65,000.00 | |
| Food & Drinks | Posino Taipei 777 Wednesday drinks For eight | -4,160.00 | ||
| Entertainment | Taipei 101 Indoor Observatory Deck ticket | -600.00 | ||
| Food & Drinks | Milksha Boba | -150.00 | ||
| Food & Drinks | Milksha Boba - coupon reduction | +20.00 | ||
| Souvenir | Taipei 101 Souvenir Shop Set of tea bags | -580.00 | ||
| Souvenir | Taipei 101 Souvenir Shop Set of three whiskey glasses | -600.00 | ||
| Currency | Grand Hyatt Taipei Advanced cash lending | +2,000.00 | ||
| Transport | Taxi Grand Hyatt Taipei to TPE | -1,400.00 | ||
| Currency | Mega International Commercial Bank NT$ to EUR conversion | +20.00 | -725.00 | |
| Currency | Mega International Commercial Bank Conversion charge | -30.00 | ||
| Accommodation | Grand Hyatt Taipei Remainder from the deposit | +195.26 | +11,908 | |
| Total | -9,372.62 | +1,846 | 0.00 |
Holy shit, that’s just about five digits! This is one expensive mid-life crisis. It’s ahead of schedule too…
The remaining NT$1,846 is cold, hard cash. I’ll keep it as a souvenir, as it is a full set of banknotes and coins, missing only the NT$½ and NT$20 coins as well as the NT$200 and NT$2,000 bills. Besides, it’s only worth about €50 and it’s somewhat hard to convert them here in France (my local bank branch for example does not deal with NT$ cash).
How was…
This isn’t a travel blog. Therefore, I’ll spare you all of the various ways a Frenchman, with severely atrophied social skills and a decade out of practice with face-to-face conversational English, bumbles around on the other side of the planet.
But if you really must know my opinions:
- Lyon Saint-Exupéry Airport
- Is big, but not big big.
- Embraer 190
- Like a 1980s B-segment car: small, very loud, bare-bones and is probably more fun as a pilot than as a passenger.
- Netherlands
- Very green, very flat, very overcast and in the middle of a ground war against water.
- Amsterdam Airport Schiphol
- Is a big one; the airplane spent so long just taxiing to the gate, I think it qualifies as a shuttle service.
- Boeing 787-9
- Like a 2010s C-segment car: bigger, quieter, touchscreen-enabled and is probably more fun as a passenger than as a pilot.
- Taipei
- My stereotypes on Asian cities learned through various media weren't all correct, but they weren't all wrong either.
- Grand Hyatt Taipei
- First time checking in a hotel and it is one step removed from John Wick's Continental; has a kick-ass concierge that procured me a carry tube for my poster in less than 36 hours.
- Taipei Food Market district
- So many dumplings...
- Taipei International Convention Center
- Bigger in the Plenary Hall than on the outside.
- Taipei 101
- A sight to behold and ear poppings to behead.
- Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport
- Is an airport with shopping malls on the side, rather than shopping malls with an airport on the side.
- Airbus A330-300
- Like a 2000s C-segment car with an aftermarket car stereo and revamped interior: a stealthy rollercoaster ride when the pilot decides to book it.
- Hong Kong
- Wouldn't know, it was night time.
- Hong Kong International Airport
- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
- Airbus A350-900
- The best ride and the best economy class a modern European widebody airplane can offer, and not just because at least one of these things is French.
- Paris
- Fucking Paris, third time I'm transiting through there in my life, that's three times too many for a proud Savoyard like me...
- Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport
- Is a restaurant with gates on the side, as things should be; consequently, sparrows roam the gates without caring for "staff only" signs, as things should be.
- Airbus A321
- Like a 1990s hotrod: a bit past its prime yet still pushes you back into the seat, rowdy during maneuvers and it looks about as much fun as a passenger than as a pilot.
Why?
I… I think I do know now.
I won’t tell you though, because that would require the Director’s cut of this story and I’ve already decided against publishing it for now. There is however another piece of the puzzle that I can provide at this point. Amid all of that chaos, one small thing still stands out.
A couple of weeks before the conference, I’ve rambled yet again on Hacker News, on a thread about writing science papers. This time, while the comment itself got relatively little traction, I received an email. Not a technical inquiry about my black magic, but one regarding how I was invited to the ACM CCS conference. Here’s a little snippet from it:
This win of yours is frankly, inspirational, and it motivates me to put my work out there, combatting my imposter syndrome.
A fan email. Oh dear Satan, I’m a role model for someone.
Back then, this was a horrifying thought for me. Now, after having completed this extremely out-of-character excursion for me… maybe I can come to terms with things like that. As for the rest, perhaps in time I’ll manage to work through the rest of my personal issues.
Now what?
Well, I attended the one of the biggest, top-tier academic conferences out there and all I got was a nice thermos flask and a virtual certificate of participation:
I did also come back with the poster and something I never, ever thought I would ever have:
Sure, it’s technically out-of-proceedings regarding the main ACM CCS conference and it’s just a poster, but it still counts I think.
More seriously, that was an experience that I’m glad to have had once. I’ve learned a lot of things, some of them unsuitable for publication on this blog, as well as discussed with a bunch of people I would’ve never met otherwise. I don’t know if I’ll do it again (and not just because of the staggering cost of self-funding this), but the attendees did recommend me to check out an industrial or community conference next time instead.
Now if you excuse me, I’ll need some time to recover from this crazy story… and not only because I’m just done coughing my lungs out. This has been an utterly exhausting endeavor over the past three months; beyond the trip itself, I’ve juggled writing a paper, designing a poster, providing support to the users of ghidra-delinker-extension and a couple of other things alongside a full-time job.
Simply put, I’m spent.