Chris Domas

Christopher Domas leads the Core Client and BIOS/UEFI offensive security research teams at Intel. His specializations are reverse engineering, processor exploitation, and automated firmware analysis. Externally, he is best known for releasing impractical solutions to non-existent problems, including the world's first single instruction C compiler (M/o/Vfuscator), unconventional counter-reverse engineering approaches (REpsych), the branchless side-channel resistant DOOM port, and Turing-machines in the vi text editor. His more relevant work includes the sandsifter processor fuzzer, rosenbridge hardware backdoor, binary visualization tool ..cantor.dust.., and the memory sinkhole x86 privilege escalation exploit.

Prior to this role, Domas served as a cybersecurity researcher at the Battelle Memorial Institute from 2009 to 2018. He specializes in embedded systems reverse-engineering (RE) and vulnerability analysis, figuring out how to manipulate electronic devices. Applying this towards national security, his group develops cyber technology that protects people on the newest front of global war.

Domas graduated from Ohio State University, where he set out to take every class offered by the school. He bounced between majors in electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, biology, chemistry, statistics, biomedical engineering, computer graphics, psychology, and linguistics, but finally ran out of money and was forced to graduate.

Settling on a degree in computer science, with an irrelevant handful of minors, he joined Battelle as a cybersecurity researcher. Today, he strives to incorporate ideas from these disparate fields to tackle the world’s most challenging cyber problems in innovative and unexpected ways. As a result of his work, he received Battelle’s coveted 2013 Emerging Scientist and 2013 Technical Achievement awards.

Domas is has been an adjunct professor at Ohio State University since 2014, and he continues to present research around the country, at cybersecurity conferences including Black Hat, REcon and DerbyCon.