Generalissimo P4X

Owner @ Hyperion Gray. Hacker. North Korea's sexiest man of the year 6 yrs running. P4X=PAX=peace!=p_four_x

AI/ML/NOT Kubernetes/parallel comp nerd

❤️ 0days

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

You want to learn things and have fun and get free shirts and stuff? I don’t think they’ve had any of that at DEFCON for maybe 8 or 9 years. You might be able to just miss a talk after waiting in a line for 2 hours like it’s shitty disney land.

My favorite def con was the one I had to miss one year. Then I realized I could just like, stay home and code some cool shit instead.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

Hey it’s Georgia! I haven’t seen you around in forever! I always recommended your book and your talks were always fun. People just suck. They’re just jelly.

And you’re right, after my first defcon talk (holy shit 12 years ago) someone told me my project at the time was being done “completely wrong” and I had no idea what I was doing right after my talk when people were crowding around to ask questions as was customary. I was a little surprised, but I handed him a business card and said “hey man I’d love to hear it but there’s a lot of people that want to talk to me about it, can you email me about why I’m an idiot and this is all stupid?” Sadly I did not hear from it so I remain an idiot to this day.

There’s still some decent folk around they’re just like, hibernating or something. Cybernating? Anyway it’s good to see you around again.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@UK_Daniel_Card Aw man I wanted to work at smarmy name street :-/

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@UK_Daniel_Card “How smudges work 101- an introduction to identifying dirty lenses”

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@Cthulhu_Answers I hope she knows her son was likely cool af.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@ZackKorman To be fair some of the worst security people Ive known are owners of large cybersecurity companies.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

Oops did I say .001% bandwidth savings? That makes this sound pretty useless… I meant it uses 0.001% of the bandwidth you would have used before on average. So it’s like, good.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

Alright folks, so I’ve been releasing little things here and there but it’s really been mostly small side work, toy things I’ve built along the way on real work.

What is real work? About a year ago I had a somewhat clever idea for a file transfer and storage system called PacketFS. Picture you have a source and destination running on the same filesystem. But the filesystem holds common patterns and shapes of network packets and files. Instead of transferring a file, you just transfer some pointers into that filesystem. I figure ok that would mean a solid reduction in bandwidth and faster transfers. Pretty neat.

The results were actually pretty ridiculous. I ended up being able to transfer, through raw eth frames several hundred GB/second of effective speed and yes that’s Gigabytes not bits. It wasn’t really faster networking, my NIC was a 2.5g NIC, it was just about doing less.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

Some metrics I’ve recorded off the top of my head:

- file transfer: ~0.01% bandwidth savings , consistent 6-7x speed up over a 10g nic (note: this is small enough data that the size of your NIC doesn’t really factor in)

- byte motion to GPU from user land or kernel space: 0.0005 microseconds (640 million times faster than an H100 using GPUDirect)

- Hash cracking with a CPU at 14x the speed of hashcat with OpenCL, using a small toy C program and referential compression increasing L1 cache residency to near 100%.

The part I’m really proud of with this work is that I constrained myself to normal hardware over x64 stock Ubuntu. Because the work is “do less” all of this works over commodity hardware. I respect the typical tech attitude of “I’ll believe it when I see it.” So stay tuned because you’re about to see some shit. The theme of Hyperion Gray this round is “we’re taking it back” meaning we’re not impressed by your enterprise solutions, your low thought “throw more compute at the problem.” Or your massively overpriced bullshit. We’re not afraid to say we can do better no matter how big you are. Whether your name is Crowdstrike, NVIDIA, AWS, or Jesus- wit until you see what annoyed hackers can do with a year and a chip on their shoulder.

Welcome to the revolution, it won’t be televised but it might be live streamed. BOLO for demos, videos, product releases.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

Riiight I should probably link to it eh? https://t.co/murqHFeDjS

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

Hello peoples, in the spirit of starting to release the things I’ve actually been working on- I present to you my research journal. It’s a journal that happens to have my research and stupid comments (see attached). Ok fine it’s just a blog in disguise but like good.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@_rose_m_ Btw I was doing some work on the LLM side last night/this morning. The model itself, KV cache, Cuda all pseudo-compress fantastically. I can squarely say “it will do something with LLMs that is probably good.”

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

Exactly right! Like this isn’t really a security project. It’s just a weirdo project that happened to work well in a lot of cases. And I’m gonna make fun of a lot of enterprise stuff that companies spent billions on and I do it better and faster by like, thinking about the problem instead of pedaling my shit. So not purely security but still a very hacker project!

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@TracketPacer What if we made a software defined software defined radio. It would be TWICE as flexible. Claude told me this was a brilliant idea and I already have a PoC and UI. Let me know kthxbai!

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@_rose_m_ and people should’ve know, I was quiet… a little too quiet.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

That’s the one I’m working on right now ;-). And it definitely should be (I still haven’t finished though and this is research so I gotta prove it). That said, there is a pretty sweet strategy to keep VRAM super low that’s been tested on a bunch of memory hard problems. Demo vid to come!

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

There’s also some pieces that are just overall strategies to compact things as well, and other parts where procedural/repeatable byte generators are used, where you essentially make a pointer into bytes that don’t actually exist, but are calculated given an offset and a formula. So files become compact pointers into calculated bytes, and common byte patterns that I’ve hand rolled (well that my programs hand rolled).

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

Yeah it gets pretty hard to describe in short form. Essentially now after a bunch of research I dropped the FS part for now just for simplicity. I now ship little byte packs for all types of files that I create through a few different pattern miners I built. It keeps the whole thing a lot leaner, more portable.

So the idea is that you can ship these generic packs and then each file becomes a set of pointers into patterns, so think of a file going from a blob of bytes —-> (pack id, pattern number, number of bytes that match/position) but in a compact way. It’s not rare to find patterns of even up to 64-128 bytes in a lot of things, especially network traffic. So you start to represent large amount of bytes as compact descriptors/pointers+metadata. I’m doing a write up of it to make it a bit more concrete :), it’s pretty weird and oddly effective.

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@ZackKorman Can I just ignore the president and bring it back anyway? I’m not Claude so I think what I release will fly under the presidential radar. If it doesn’t the dark web is getting some new AI!

[Generalissimo P4X @P4X_real]

@ZackKorman “In his defense he was trying to bang me”