Joanna Rutkowska

Who is Joanna Rutkowska?

Joanna Rutkowska is a Polish computer security researcher, primarily known for her research on low-level security and stealth malware.

She became known after the Black Hat Briefings conference in Las Vegas in August 2006, where Rutkowska presented an attack against Vista kernel protection mechanism, and also a technique dubbed Blue Pill, that used hardware virtualization to move a running OS into a virtual machine. Subsequently she has been named one of Five Hackers who Put a Mark on 2006 by eWeek Magazine for her research on the topic. The original concept of Blue Pill was published by another researcher at IEEE Oakland on May 2006 under the name VMBR. Its effectiveness is a subject of a debate among some researchers.

During following years, Rutkowska continued to focus on low-level security. In 2007 she demonstrated that certain types of hardware-based memory acquisition are unreliable and can be defeated. Later in 2007, together with a team member Alexander Tereshkin, presented further research on virtualization malware. In 2008, Rutkowska with her team focused on Xen hypervisor security. In 2009, together with a team member Rafal Wojtczuk, presented an attack against Intel Trusted Execution Technology and Intel System Management Mode.