Sign in

Ange

@angealbertini.bsky.social
985 followers 76 following 230 posts

Reverse engineer, file formats expert.
Corkami, CPS2Shock, PoC||GTFO, Sha1tered, Magika...
Security engineer @ Google. He/him.

PostsRepliesMedia
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I wrote the FlareOn13.doc file of the Flare-On 2026 challenge, so take a look if you like unusual file formats ! I heard it breaks parsers… flare-on13.ctfd.io
flare-on13.ctfd.io
FLARE-On 13
032
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Is there a “widespread” and modern image format that supports palette cycling, scanline or midline palette change or other display tricks, such as multi-image flickering ?
100
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Suggestions for other legendary pixel artists are welcome …
000
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Is pixel art reverse-engineering a documented addiction ? Such as the urge to reverse and extract all the palette-cycling/animated art made by Akio, Mark Ferrari or Henk Nieborg ? Asking for a friend…
240
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Recreating the original hardware protection media, conversion and restoration of all assets, uncovering undocumented quirks, bugs and cheat codes… And creating the “best version ever”, of course ;)
001
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
My experience of retrogaming preservation nowadays: Handling all revisions of a game or engine, full code analysis, reimplementation of every algorithm, lossless codecs “reversal”, emulators instrumentation, complete hardware exploration…
110
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Any Amiga fan out there ? I’m looking for an older and rare version of a 1989 game - or the earliest Whdload version of it, that I can’t find (only mentions). (For a large full recomp project)
102
Reposted by Ange
gloriouscow.bsky.social @gloriouscow.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I've published a brief blog explaining how this all works. martypc.blogspot.com/2026/08/exec...
martypc.blogspot.com
Executable Emoji
Warning: This page contains hundreds of emoji. If you're using a screen reader, be sure it doesn't read them all out loud. A whole bunch o...
515760
Reposted by Ange
gloriouscow.bsky.social @gloriouscow.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
The following emoji are a valid DOS executable. 🐸☺️😖🐰😗😯😯😯😯😯😯😯😹😯🕳️😯🐮🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐⭐🍽️🍽️🍽️🍽️🐮🐰😔😬😬🗓️🍽️👁️📗🐪🗓️🧮🧯📗🐪🐮🗓️😿🧯🧯🧯🧯📗🐪🗓️🐮📗🐪🗓️🧮🧮🧯🧯👁️📗🐪🐮🗓️🧮🧯🧯🧯🧯🧯🧯📗🐪🗓️😿🧯🧯🧯🧯📗🐪🗓️😿🍽️🍽️🍽️🍽️🐮📗🐪🐮🗓️😯🍽️🍽️👁️📗🐪🐮🐮🐮🗓️😿🧮🧮🧮📗🐪🗓️🧮👁️👁️🍽️👁️📗🐪🐰😔🐐🐐♿🇹🇭⏪✋💕🐀🍥🐐📣🈚🌌🌋🏐🌕👻🌺🌻🍵🆙🌮🍝🌐🌋🍠🌋🐅🍜💒🌳👹🎇👹🉑🎎🉑💞🆖🌳🆎🎇👹🉑🎎🉑💞🐖👯🆖🌻🕕🌿🐐🍙👺👽🌳👹🎇💗🉑🎎🉑💞🖕🎎🌙👻🌺🌻🐻🎂🌻🌳👮🐖🐸🍤🕕🌻🐠🐻🍝🌻🌳🌷🐎🌷🍭🌌💗👻🐖🐖🌜🌛📛🍕🍓🍪🍷🌙🍘🍾🍪👻🌺🌻🌙🌘🌙🐗🌊🏐💗🎐🧯🔥🌉
16505173
Reposted by Ange
Chris Covell @chriscovell.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Here's something wild: I thought I found a bug in my FAT12 LFN (long filename) code, but it turns out that the checksums for the files "GREEN.SMC" and "SUPERF~1.BMP" both add up to 0x48, causing a bit of an identity crisis. How did OSes like Windows handle these cases?
2142
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
An AI told me today that we’re in 2024, for no obvious reason: I had just asked to look for past occurrences of specific events. I didn’t expect it to hallucinate on such a small and yet obvious fact. Did you ever encounter such a trivially wrong hallucination?
110
Reposted by Ange
David Monniaux @monniauxd.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
Profitons-en pour rappeler qu'il n'y a non pas un mais DEUX postes de PR à VERIMAG cette année : cybersécurité (UFR) IA explicable / monitorable / lien avec méthodes formelles (ENSIMAG) me contacter pour plus de renseignements
027
Reposted by Ange
joern @jrn.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
Lands of Packets TTL exceeded. I would like to collect texts from the scene about FX in his memory. A collection of obituaries that will then be posted on phenoelit.de. If anyone would like to contribute, please contact me. Mail: joernchen@phenoelit.de Signal: jrn.07
0167
Reposted by Ange
Jeff Moss @thedarktangent.defcon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/03/2026
RIP FX - You are a legend
55926
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
Different prints!
010
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
I'm looking for a 39C3 ticket for a relative. No scammer please ;)
000
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
To check if a file starts with MZ or GIF, just use file/libmagic. You don't need AI or Magika for that. TrID has a lot of heuristics, but a lot of false positives. Magika is useful in different ways, across binary and source types, and is quite fast. But not fit for weird files.
020
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Magika is a fast file type identifier that covers many file types, binary formats or source texts. It's not made to detect adversarial attacks. It's useful for different things that classic binary scanning can't do at this speed. Magika was trained on all file types with enough available samples.
110
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Weird files are out of scope of Magika. It just wasn't trained on them. It's trivial to inject some data in a file and keep it functional (w/ my tool Mitra, for example). So take a JPG, inject a lot of JavaScript data, and ...guess what ? Check it out: github.com/corkami/mitra
github.com
GitHub - corkami/mitra: A generator of weird files (binary polyglots, near polyglots, polymocks...)
A generator of weird files (binary polyglots, near polyglots, polymocks...) - corkami/mitra
110
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Of course, it's possible to create weird files that will fool Magika and other tools. Polymocks, polyglots... I made quite a few - check my CCC talk last year: speakerdeck.com/ange/fearsom...
speakerdeck.com
Fearsome File Formats
Presented at 38C3 in Hamburg on the 28th December 2024. Video recording: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-fearsome-file-formats With so many open-sou…
110
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Magika uses the first and last kilobytes of the files. That way, if the file is slightly corrupted, the filetype might still be properly identified. Magika returns several file types if needed. It's one of its advantages, but a double-edged sword.
110
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
So file contents are used to determine the file type. To check if the file starts with '\x7FELF', 'MZ' or 'GIF', you don't need IA. But some file formats don't start with a clear 'magic' signature at offset zero. And what if you also want to tell apart C++, RUST and HTML ? No magic for source files
110
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
To identify file types, the worst way are file extensions: the extension is stored in the filesystem entry, not in the file content. It can be lost, modified, variable... Almost all file formats are known under several file extensions: .JPG/.JPEG, .ZIP/.APK/.DOCX, .EXE/.DLL, .ELF/.SO ...
110
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
In the process, I also studied in depth other file type identifiers, and I've been contributing to most of them before, including LibMagic, TrID... Check my talk: speakerdeck.com/ange/overvie...
speakerdeck.com
Overview of file type identifiers
Yara, LibMagic (file, binwalk, polyfile), TrID, Yara, Magika, PeID, Pronom, FDD, ShareMime, DiE... How do they work? What are their pros and cons, th…
120
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Hi newcomers: I've been contributing to Magika since 2023 (it became public in 2024). Some clarifications regarding the recent Magika release... Magika is useful in its own way, and used in production. The recent Rust release doesn't change how Magika is fundamentally working.
241
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
Is there nowadays a better content extractor from PDF than the classic ‘pdftotext’ ? Something (maybe ML-driven) that would handle tables, rows of text and formulas ?
200
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 08/11/2025
I love the little details: Drop and run, piezo sound…
030
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
Public blog post: opensource.googleblog.com/2025/11/anno... Source: github.com/google/magika
opensource.googleblog.com
Announcing Magika 1.0: now faster, smarter, and rebuilt in Rust
000
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
Magika 1.0 is released, available in Rust, TypeScript and Python, and supporting more than 200 file types.
opensource.googleblog.com
Announcing Magika 1.0: now faster, smarter, and rebuilt in Rust
151
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
If you’re into malware analysis, you should really give Malcat a try. A great all-in-one tool with hex and structure views, disasm and decomp, integrated Yara, python scripting, similarities scanning... Definitely worth trying!
070
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Is there a good source for non-malicious executables? categorized and with some variety, across platforms, languages...?
230
Reposted by Ange
Fabrice Rossi @fabricerossi.eurosky.social · 30/09/2025
Brand new paper with Roxane Cohen, Robin David (both from @quarkslab.bsky.social ) and Florian Yger on obfuscation detection in binary code doi.org/10.1007/s411... We show that carefully selected features can be leveraged by graph neural networks to outperform classical solutions.
doi.org
Identifying obfuscated code through graph-based semantic analysis of binary code - Applied Network Science
Protecting sensitive program content is a critical concern in various situations, ranging from legitimate use cases to unethical contexts. Obfuscation is one of the most used techniques to ensure such a protection. Consequently, attackers must first detect and characterize obfuscation before launching any attack against it. This paper investigates the problem of function-level obfuscation detection using graph-based approaches, comparing algorithms, from classical baselines to advanced techniques like Graph Neural Networks (GNN), on different feature choices. We consider various obfuscation types and obfuscators, resulting in two complex datasets. Our findings demonstrate that GNNs need meaningful features that capture aspects of function semantics to outperform baselines. Our approach shows satisfactory results, especially in a challenging 11-class classification task and in two practical binary analysis examples. It highlights how much obfuscation and optimization are intertwined in binary code and that a better comprehension of these two principles are fundamental in order to obtain better detection results.
1127
Reposted by Ange
Nicolas Seriot @nst021.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
Apple Preview 11.0 (macOS 15.5) does crash while opening gist.github.com/nst/373748f2... as x.pdf (malformed ICC profile). [com.apple.Preview] CoreGraphics assert(cs != NULL) failed in img_pixels_for_destination: colorspace missing CoreGraphics/Images/CGSImage.c:4029: failed assertion `cs != NULL'
gist.github.com
111
Reposted by Ange
Jon Bailey @thoreandan.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
lynn.github.io/flateview/ Impressive. Visualizer of zlib (gzip) - paste in a paragraph or two of text. Reminds me of @angealbertini.bsky.social's binary file-format illustrations (google 'corkami').
Color coded display of a zlib compressed version of this post's text, rendered by the flateview demo
073
Reposted by Ange
Matthew Garrett @mjg59.eicar-test-file.zip · 24/09/2025
I have been learning more about PDFs than I really wanted to for maybe the absolutely most funny reason possible - letting agency forgery: mjg59.dreamwidth.org/73317.html
612433
Reposted by Ange
Hexacorn @hexacorn.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Enter Sandbox 30: Static Analysis gone wrong www.hexacorn.com/blog/2025/09...
062
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
Grab your @phrack copy (beautiful 150 page color print) at @nullcon’s registration booth!
030
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
You can do that with my Mitra tool with the `--force` parameter (for arbitrary content injection) on ~40 standard formats (which covers many more subformats). github.com/corkami/mitra
github.com
GitHub - corkami/mitra: A generator of weird files (binary polyglots, near polyglots, polymocks...)
A generator of weird files (binary polyglots, near polyglots, polymocks...) - corkami/mitra
010
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Bash script injection in a JPEG file: hackers-arise.com/the-one-man-...
hackers-arise.com
The One-Man APT, Part I: A Picture That Can Execute Code on the Target The One-Man APT, Part I: A Picture That Can Execute Code on the Target - Hackers Arise
Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to replicate the stealthy behavior of a modern cyber‑attack using artificial intelligence? As part of my research, I focused on the techniques used by a Linux-b...
120
Reposted by Ange
joern @jrn.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
Today I have a more serious topic than usual, please consider reposting for reach: My wife and I are urgently looking for a specialist in neuropediatrics or a similar field for our autistic child with a diagnosed, but not further specified, movement disorder [1/4]
1422
Reposted by Ange
Jorian @jorianwoltjer.com · 05/06/2025
Just pushed a new frontend for my site, and a new post! This one's about an tricky file write vulnerability on Windows in OBS. By crafting an image with very specific pixels, we can plant a backdoor on your PC all from an attacker's site by misconfiguring: jorianwoltjer.com/blog/p/resea...
jorianwoltjer.com
OBS WebSocket to RCE | Jorian Woltjer
Disabling password authentication of your OBS WebSocket server can have devastating consequences. We'll attack from the browser to construct an RCE payload on Windows formed from the pixels of an imag...
152
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
C'est surprenant effectivement, mais peut-être le PDF 1.7 contient de nombreuses informations supplémentaires (accessibilité, XML...) plus récentes.
020
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 01/06/2025
I had a minor printing problem with an article where the last few letters of the longest lines of text were missing. It was a small mental puzzle every 5-10 lines to guess the missing letters. An interesting exercise to stay focused throughout the article.
000
Reposted by Ange
Andrew @aced.cafe · 25/04/2025
Fun and informative, as always, thank you!
001
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
QQ: what's your favorite PDF analysis tool [for malicious files or 'standard' ones]? (besides peepdf / Stevens' PDF parser+id / VeraPDF)
010
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
"Polyglot files are unnatural and never existed in the wild", they say. Aperture cards are punched cards with a microfiche, indexing 'analogue' images with punched cards data on the same medium. A standard polyglot document IRL defined in the 1960s.
A photo of an aperture card:
a 80-column punched card with columns 54 to 76 used by a microfiche.
0247
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
In the font, yes. In the embedded font of the PDF, no.
010
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
You’re making a PDF about weird file formats and PDF… and the PDF doesn’t let you write “file”… very meta.
A PDF showing some text about the Doom PDF/EXE/PE polyglot file format, where the ‘fi’ ligature of ‘file’ isn’t visible.
142
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
Thank you!
010
Ange @angealbertini.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
The craziest file I made & visualized recently was combining the Doom PDF with a DOS & Windows (EXE & PE) polyglot. It runs Doom on OS from 1993 until today, and Chrome-based PDF viewers! You can make it an HTML/JS polyglot too to run on most browsers! (3/3)
The ultimate Doom polyglot, dissected: DOS executable, Windows Portable Executable, and PDF for Chrome via JavaScript! With offsets, explanations and snippets from the file.
0226