Ayman Borji
Security Researcher - Pentester
Ericsson
As a skilled penetration tester, I bring a wealth of experience in identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in complex IT systems.
Speaker sessions
Breaking Into the BEAM: Dynamic Introspection of Erlang Systems in Opaque Environments
Erlang is the backbone of many high-availability systems in telecom, IoT, and distributed infrastructure. However, it remains largely unexplored by the reverse engineering and security research communities, particularly in scenarios where source code and metadata are unavailable. While existing tools offer some support for static bytecode analysis, dynamic introspection into running Erlang systems remains a blind spot.This research introduces a novel methodology for blackbox dynamic analysis of BEAM-based systems. We demonstrate how to trace, inspect, and manipulate live Erlang processes in production-like environments—without source code, symbols, or conventional debugging hooks. Through careful analysis of the BEAM virtual machine internals, we expose techniques to intercept function execution, reconstruct runtime behavior, and perform low-level process instrumentation.This work aims to open up Erlang as a viable target for dynamic reverse engineering, providing new pathways for security research on a historically under-analyzed platform.
- 14:00
- Tue
- 02 Dec
Stage:
Briefings 1
Sessions Type:
Presentation