In 1990, Cristina Cifuentes worked on a machine code interpreter for the Modula-2 programming language as part of her Compilers project. That summer, she integrated it into a mixed GPM Modula-2 compiler/interpreter for the 8086 processor. This gave her hands-on experience with assembly language and the process of converting intermediate representations into executable code, laying the groundwork for her later research.
In 1994, she submitted a PhD thesis entitled Reverse Compilation Techniques. The work involved analyzing 80286 DOS binaries, studying assembly language, mapping groups of instructions into graphs, tracing parameters and data flows, and understanding how compilers optimized code. Her groundbreaking research introduced techniques that, while initially a niche academic endeavor, gained significant traction in the 2000s with the rising focus on application security and need to reverse engineer malware
In this keynote, Dr Cifuentes reflects on her pioneering PhD work, the evolution of decompilation technology over the past three decades, its adoption in commercial applications, and its role in developing tools for malware analysis.
Through this retrospective, she connects the foundational research of her early career with its enduring impact on cybersecurity today.
About the Author
Dr Cristina Cifuentes is Vice President of Oracle’s Software Assurance organization. Cristina’s passion for tackling the big issues in the field of Program Analysis began with her doctoral work in binary decompilation at the Queensland University of Technology, which led to her being named the Mother of Decompilation for her contributions to this domain.
Before she joined Oracle and Sun Microsystems, Cristina held academic posts at major Australian Universities, co-edited Going Digital, a landmark book on Cybersecurity, and served on the executive committees of ACM SIGPLAN and IEEE Reverse Engineering.
About LABScon
This presentation was featured live at LABScon 2024, an immersive 3-day conference bringing together the world’s top cybersecurity minds, hosted by SentinelOne’s research arm, SentinelLabs.
Keep up with all the latest on LABScon 2025 here.
