Mikhail Yakshin
Mikhail Yakshin is a software engineer and reverse-engineering
enthusiast with a long-standing interest in data formats, binary
analysis, and the power of formal specifications. He is the creator of
Kaitai Struct, an open-source declarative language and toolkit for
describing and parsing binary data structures.
Over the years, Mikhail has worked across embedded systems,
networking, and systems programming, driven by a passion for making
complex binary data more transparent and accessible. In recent years,
he has led a team in the field of observability as a Principal
Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft Ireland Research.
Session
Kaitai Struct is a tool for dealing with binary formats. Binary formats are everywhere: archive files, executables, filesystems, multimedia files, network protocols, etc. If your application needs to read data in a specific binary format, you need a parser that unpacks the bytes into meaningful data structures that you can work with. There are libraries doing that for popular formats, but what if there is no suitable library in your programming language for the format you need?