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angealbertini.bsky.social
Ange
@angealbertini.bsky.social
930 followers 73 following 210 posts
Reverse engineer, file formats expert.
Corkami, CPS2Shock, PoC||GTFO, Sha1tered, Magika...
Security engineer @ Google. He/him.
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angealbertini.bsky.social
Grab your @phrack copy (beautiful 150 page color print) at @nullcon’s registration booth!
September 5, 2025 at 6:54 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
"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.
April 2, 2025 at 7:43 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
In the font, yes.
In the embedded font of the PDF, no.
April 1, 2025 at 5:25 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
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.
April 1, 2025 at 4:30 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
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.
April 1, 2025 at 6:34 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
In PagedOut 6, I showed many PDF tricks by dissecting a crazy yet fully working handmade “Hello World” PDF file.
A handmade PDF with no valid signature, dummy stream object, weird object ordering, no XREF…
March 29, 2025 at 6:48 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
I made in PagedOut 6 an illustration on the basics of the PDF format.
A dissection of a “Hello World” PDF that shows the relation between the PDF objects.
March 29, 2025 at 6:24 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
The livestream on PDF file structure is up.
Following the PDF basics livestream, it covers all kinds of PDF structures that you can see in the wild and how to convert them to a classic and accessible form.
www.youtube.com/live/9XNdTAP...
A preview of the Youtube livestream with the timestamps.
February 20, 2025 at 9:50 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
I just pushed an update to logparse to detect the near-collision blocks (w/ no difference) of TextColl.
Thanks Marc!
github.com/corkami/coll...
A terminal showing the latest version of logparse.py identifying both blocks of TextColls collisions as 'APop' and 'dBB'.
February 20, 2025 at 8:13 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
The livestream on multi-hashcolls is up.
Covering the hashcoll tag in VT, specific file format structures, defanging files, Stevens' DetectColl, safe hashes...
www.youtube.com/live/1D6C6z_...
A preview of the Youtube livestream on hashcols mitigation.
February 20, 2025 at 6:58 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
J’espère bien !
J’aurais l’air de quoi si je n’avais plus que des fichiers normaux ?!
Fichier suspect détecté ! Un fichier potentiellement dangereux a été détecté dans votre Google Drive. Nous avons identifié un fichier qui pourrait contenir un virus ou un contenu malveillant. Pour protéger votre compte, nous vous recommandons de supprimer ce fichier immédiatement.
February 19, 2025 at 12:46 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
The livestream on multi-hashcolls is up!
Awesome that David joined and commented on his own hashquines!
www.youtube.com/live/-asJnf-...
A preview of the livestream's thumbnail, showing presidential predictions, an MD5 pile-up, Hashquines for PostScript, Gif, PDF, Tiff, NES, PNG, GZIP, LZ4, Zst, Tar...
February 18, 2025 at 8:42 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
The livestream on crypto-polyglots is up!
www.youtube.com/live/RP5PVRU...
A Youtube preview of the livestream with its index, mentioning polyglots, near-polyglots and crypto-polyglots as well as CTR, GCM, SIV, OCB3 cipher modes, among other things...
February 16, 2025 at 8:12 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
More advanced hash collisions: Shattered++, Lossless jpegs, jpeg as data & image, .tar.gz and Zip+XML (instant Office document collisions).
www.youtube.com/live/fCNx2cO...
February 9, 2025 at 9:39 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
We hexplored the basics of hash collisions and how they can be exploited, exploiting MD5 with Png, Gif, mp4 or Jpg, and also Pdf with SHA1 of course!
www.youtube.com/live/wv8aiqW...
A screenshot of the YouTube livestream.
February 9, 2025 at 8:45 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
...and our paper on authenticated encryption that has a section on abusing file formats.
eprint.iacr.org/2020/1456
The title page of the academic paper "How to Abuse and Fix Authenticated Encryption Without Key Commitment", by: Ange Albertini, Thai Duong, Shay Gueron, Stefan Kölbl, Atul Luykx, and Sophie Schmieg. 3 artifact badges are visible: available, functional, reproduced. Section 4.3 "File format characteristics", showing the start of the discussion on abusing file formats.
February 2, 2025 at 8:07 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
February 1, 2025 at 9:43 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
Coming up this weekend: PE & Mitra!
January 31, 2025 at 1:44 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
Thanks for your attention,
it was fun!
I crafted a working Doom triglot:
Dos executable, Portable executable and PDF.
www.youtube.com/live/nG2RZrD...
A screenshot of a YouTube livestream on the Dos EXE format showing a Doom polyglot.
January 30, 2025 at 9:15 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
Coming up next:
the .EXE file format!
A preview of a scheduled livestream on the EXE file formats. Mentioned topics: it doesn’t always start with MZ, the format evolved, modern Windows don’t just use the PE, PE don’t always use just a stub, and finally the ultimate Doom polyglot!
January 30, 2025 at 10:53 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
Thanks everyone!
www.youtube.com/live/-6tPcUX...
A screenshot of Youtube showing a JPEG file contents being hexplored visually.
January 29, 2025 at 9:26 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
January 28, 2025 at 8:47 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
A Youtube livestream showing a COM/MBR "polyglot".
January 27, 2025 at 8:43 PM
angealbertini.bsky.social
www.youtube.com/live/y24GaVZ...
A screenshot of a Youtube preview showing a Clippy SVG being edited at XML level.
January 27, 2025 at 8:39 AM
angealbertini.bsky.social
I draw my graphics with #Inkscape.
My next livestream will be an introduction to Inkscape!
January 25, 2025 at 10:23 PM