4 2 1 Christopher Domas The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization
Why Hacker News recommends it
Regarded as one of the coolest talks ever, with a futuristic binary visualization demo that has inspired later tools.
What it is
Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.
Recommended by 7 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2013 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec e12e · 2014-03 · on “Introducing Ring -3 Rootkits: BIOS rootkit targeting vPro chipsets (2009) [pdf]”
You might want to have a look at Bossard's presentation from defcon20 (2012?), "Hardware backdooring is possible": [LINK] He's done a few of these, so I might be getting them mixed up -- but the message is basically that x86 (and by extension amd64) is hopelessly broken due to legacy crap that sort of hides between the cpu, ram and devices (the software running on your cdrom drive, on the network or sound card...). Also related: 4 2 1 Christopher Domas The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization [this video] [ed2: Skip to ~14-15 minutes to get to the good stuff, then go back and watch the whole thing :) software home page and demo download (I don't think there's anything new published): [LINK]
Strong rec LargoLasskhyfv · 2020-10 · on “Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync”
Like CantorDust by Christopher Domas@Batelle? [this video] really blew my mind when I saw it. Btw. about 8 years later they finally delivered, by releasing it as plug-in for Ghidra! Yay! [LINK]
Strong rec vanderZwan · 2026-08 · on “Assembly Hall of Shame”
Also came up with the original ..cantor.dust.. binary visualization tool, which is a tool I never used directly but Chris' presentation of it in 2012 is still one of the coolest talks I've ever seen. [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]
Strong rec nerdsniper · 2026-08 · on “Spaghettifying DRAM”
My introduction to his work was "The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization"[0] which completely blew me away. It still feels futuristic today, 13 years later. Novel UI/UX paradigms like this are slow to find widespread adoption, even when they're so clearly demonstrated to be such an ideal fit for their purpose. 0: [this video]
Recommends rckoepke · 2020-10 · on “Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync”
This is my favorite version of it: [this video] Some people have taken this concept very far. Batelle's CantorDust (was?) a pretty fully developed 3D visualization software for binary packages utilizing many different views and filters with convenient UX for selecting blocks of code graphically and zooming in on the corresponding hex, or vice-versa. Edit: I looked very hard for this software about 6-12 months ago and couldn't find anything...it appeared to be vaporware. However, 'LargoLasskhyfv posted in this thread tree at the exact same time I did and noted that it was just released about 3 months ago as a plugin for Ghidra. I'm very excited to play around with it.
Recommends rckoepke · 2020-10 · on “Visualizing binaries with space-filling curves (2011)”
This demo does a fairly decent job of explaining how you'd use these kinds of visualizations: [this video] Batelle's CantorDust combines the visualization concept with a convenient UX for selecting blocks of code graphically and zooming in on the corresponding hex, or vice-versa. The "devil is in the details" with respect to the UX for these kinds of tools. The visualization or 2D image by itself is somewhat less useful without being able to snap to the corresponding part of the hex or IDA/Ghidra disassembly. I do think adding a 3rd dimension to the visualization probably adds somewhat more utility as well. The recently released open source package for CantorDust seems to omit the 3D visualizatio
Recommends stack_underflow · 2021-02 · on “Plain Text Protocols”
Your post reminded me of the presentation on cantor.dust: [LINK] [this video] - Christopher Domas The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization (very interesting presentation) Looks like there's even been a recently open sourced plugin for Ghidra released by Battelle: [LINK]
Recommends mk_stjames · 2023-12 · on “Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers (1995)”
Those are trigrams of all 3-byte sequences of binary executables arranged in a cube. Here are some more examples of that type of viz: [LINK] And here is a talk about binary visualization by the legend Christopher Domas, which is where I first saw it used: [this video]