Bootstrapping an Architectural Research Platform

Explore the fundamentals of x86 architectural research for security professionals in this 56-minute conference talk from 44CON Information Security Conference. Gain essential knowledge on CPU ring privileges, architectural events monitoring, and research hypervisors. Learn about protected mode, paging, cache, virtualization, boot processes, memory management, and advanced concepts like performance counters and branch tracing. Discover tools such as LibPMI, Simplevisor, and PuffWrap for rapid research setup, and understand case studies on OS monitoring and troubleshooting. Equip yourself with the skills to focus on critical research questions while minimizing setup time in x86 platform security investigations.