Fernando Silva

Background

About Fernando Silva

Since very young, I was attracted to the edge interface between electronics and computing. Instead of studding “Data Processing” when I was becoming a technician, I did “Industrial Computing,” and I played with analogic and digital electronics, besides some low-level languages, like assembly and C. Later I have graduated in “Computer Engineering.” I did embedded software using micro-controllers, learned about FPGA. Our graduating project was made having an ATMEL microcontroller interfacing with a computer through USB using a Plug & Play device driver I built from the scratch. I started programming for Windows when the 32-bit platform started. I dealt with Windows services; sockets and I used to maintain a legacy device driver that was responsible for communicating to their own network card. Then, I worked with file system filters for access control and auditing, biometric authentication, file system level encryption and more. At that time, most of my carrier was built around security solutions, doing reverse engineering, building software against key-loggers and mouse-loggers, process protection, Windows API hooking, DLL injection. Everything using a mix of low-lever user-mode code and kernel-mode drivers. At the same time, my passion for Windows internals always pushed me to learn as much as I could. I got some of Microsoft certifications, one of them is about Windows Internals. I have read each edition of Windows Internals since they talked Windows NT 4.0 all the way up to Windows 10. It could not be different with Windows device drivers. After becoming obsessed, I read every book I could find about Windows drivers. Then, because I had a blog about this subject, I was invited to give trainings about Windows internals and device drivers. That was the reason why I created my small and shy training company at 2008. When IBM hired me, I started working on an actual file system driver, one of the most complex kinds of kernel drivers that exist. I became the technical lead for Windows on this module called MVFS (Multi Version File System). I can say the biggest project I took care of was moving the solution from a filter to a layered file system. That made me a file system specialist on Windows and I have been doing so since 2007. In summary, besides knowing a lot about Windows security and file systems, I have been working closely with hardware device drivers and I have some affinity with firmware and electronics.