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The core of vulnerability research (VR) is finding and exploiting bugs, but that’s an oversimplification of what professional vulnerability researchers do. Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in software and hardware targets is an involved, time consuming and often difficult process.

When asked how they’d describe vulnerability research, one researcher said the following:

"Taking a new device or piece of software, figuring out how it's supposed to work (down to the very lowest level) and then figuring out if it can be made to do things it's not supposed to."

We can distil this process into 3 main stages:

• Reverse Engineering – Figuring out how the target works
• Vulnerability Discovery – Seeing if we can make the target do something it’s not intended to do
• Exploit Development – Turning that knowledge into a reliable proof of concept exploit

It’s not just about finding bugs, researchers will also want to gain a thorough understanding of how something works. The more you know about a target, whether that’s a specific piece of hardware, software or an operating system, the easier it is to identify things that may be interesting. This in turn makes it easier to identify where vulnerabilities may be present.

Vulnerability researchers generally work on projects within a dedicated team. The individual projects and goals may vary, but within each team everyone is looking at the same broad topic, such as Android, iOS or embedded devices to name a few.

Project work is where VR professionals will spend the bulk of their time, typically on tasks which support one of the three stages of reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery or exploit development. That could involve examining a target in a disassembler (such as IDA or Binary Ninja), reading source code, writing tooling such as fuzzers, crafting an exploit or just learning about a new piece of technology.

Work is usually on behalf of clients, which could consist of government, telecoms, financial services and more. Alongside their technical work, researchers will need to engage and communicate with clients, exploring how they can deliver the best work possible.

Globally, VR is known to be a tight-knit and supportive industry where individuals regularly share their work with one another. As such, researchers will spend time throughout the year attending talks, workshops and conferences which take place across the world.