Alex Ionescu’s Blog

Alex’s experience in OS design and Kernel coding dates back to his early adolescence, when he first played with John Fine’s educational OS/Kernel/Bootloader code. Since then, he has been active in the area of NT Kernel Development, offering help and advice for driver developers, as well as in the NT Reverse Engineering/Security field, where he has published a number of articles and source code, such as on the topic of NTFS Advanced Data Streams. His contributions include documentation for the Linux NTFS project, various award-winning articles on Planet Source Code and an extensive research paper on the Visual Basic Metadata and Pseudo-code format. He has also done hands-on training for security companies and given talks at security conferences (REcon 2006) and he sometimes posts articles on the security community site OpenRCE.

Since Summer 2004, Alex has been working as a core kernel developer for the ReactOS project, where his experience with the NT Kernel continued to grow. His responsibilities included the coding of multiple kernel functions, and he has extensively worked on the Object Manager, Process Manager, Executive and parts of the Microkernel such as exception dispatching, thread scheduling and system traps. He is now working on the Local Procedure Call module (LPC), the User-Mode Debugging module (Dbgk) and the Kernel Debugging library (Kd) and expects to work on the HAL and Subsystem Manager (SMSS) later in 2007.

Alex Ionescu is also the TinyKRNL Project Coordinator is and he is responsible for overseeing the general progress of the project, organizing the other developers, handling outside communication as well as defining the vision and goals of the project.

He is currently studying at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and is in his first year of obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering. He is also a Microsoft Student Ambassador and is representing the company on campus as a Technical Rep.