Kirils Solovjovs
Kirils Solovjovs is Latvia's leading white-hat hacker and privacy activist. He began programming at age 7, and by grade 9 was already writing machine code directly in a hex editor during lunch breaks. His hobby is asking "what are you gonna do with that piece of information about me?" everywhere every time.
Renowned for uncovering and responsibly disclosing critical vulnerabilities in national and international systems, today Kirils serves as lead researcher at Possible Security.
Interventions
Firmware of proprietary systems lies on the border of hardware and software. This talk follows up on last year's presentation "Breaking both wires: Reverse engineering builiding access control system for MITM attacks and spoofing", shifting focus from the physical and protocol layer to its embedded firmware, and exploring how behavior, timing, and security logic are implemented, and how they can be systematically uncovered. The talk is structured as a guided progression designed for audiences starting from zero, gradually building the skills and intuition needed to move from an opaque firmware image to a meaningful system-level understanding through iterative analysis, experimentation, and correction of early mistakes.
Privacy in Europe, and the wider Western world, is undergoing a structural shift toward proactive systems of identity verification, communication governance, environmental sensing, and data infrastructure control.
This talk examines four converging mechanisms driving this transition: age verification frameworks that bind access to verified identity; ongoing EU-level proposals around inspection of private encrypted communications under the guise of child safety; expansion of ubiquitous physical-world surveillance through biometric systems, and mobile inference; and the accelerating impact of AI systems that transform public data into inferential and generative models with limited provenance guarantees. Together, these developments suggest a move away from privacy as a default property of digital systems toward privacy as a conditional, regulated state contingent on compliance with layered technical and legal requirements. Using global trajectory as the primary case study, the talk argues that these mechanisms are not isolated policy choices but components of a broader convergence toward an "access-controlled internet," where identity, communication, and content are increasingly mediated by interoperable governance systems rather than open network principles.
Think you can bluff your way through a security talk with zero prep? Now is your chance! At Security Impress Karaoke¹, you'll be handed a totally random, security-themed slide deck you’ve never seen before - and have just 3 minutes to present it like a pro.