CERT.at supports the DeepSec 2016 Conference

René Pfeiffer/ September 27, 2016/ Conference, Security

We welcome the Computer Emergency Response Team Austria as a support of DeepSec 2016! CERT.at is the primary contact point for IT-security in a national context. CERT.at will coordinate other CERTs operating in the area of critical infrastructure or communication infrastructure. When it comes to incident response, the coordination of any information regarding the event is crucial. CERT.at fulfils this role since 2008. In addition CERT.at is actively involved in security research. Minibis is a tool for automatically building an automated malware analysis station based on a concept introduced in the paper “Mass Malware Analysis: A Do-It-Yourself Kit”. Have a chat with them during the conference. They will host demonstrations and let you see their software tools in action. Of course, in case you ever have to handle incidents you should talk to them

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DeepSec2016 Talk: Cover Your SaaS: Protecting Your Cloud With Analytics and Machine Learning – Ian Thornton-Trump

Sanna/ September 24, 2016/ Conference, Security, Security Intelligence

Some people call military intelligence an oxymoron. This usually happens when something goes wrong. It might be due to sloppy reconnaissance, operations, or simply bad luck. While it’s always good to have someone or something to blame, things are not so easy in modern „cyberspace“. Improving your security means to have something to base this improvement on. Despite the fact that being lucky is never a bad thing, the selection of your defences and the assessment of the threats you are facing need to be based on something more solid. IT departments have been mining logs and other kind of raw materials that produce metrics for decades. Every once in a while there is a new trend. Now that we can store enormous amounts of data and can access it, we have a lot

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Fuzzing Remote Interfaces for System Services in Android – Alexandru Blanda

Sanna/ September 23, 2016/ Conference, Security

When in doubt, go for the core. This statement is true for most Star Wars films. It is also valid for any kind of security research. Modern software has tons of dependencies, metric or otherwise. In addition, most platforms provide a set of basic components accessible by API. The wheel has been invented already. So if you look for weaknesses, addressing these fundamentals is a good idea. Why start at the outer shell, when you can directly go to the foundation of the walls. Siege warfare used to be like that. What happens when you combine the technique of fuzzing with accessible interfaces will be explained by Alexandru Blanda in his presentation at DeepSec 2016. System services represent one of the core components in Android, implementing many fundamental Android features such as media playback,

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Malicious Hypervisor Threat – Phase Two: How to Catch the Hypervisor – Mikhail A. Utin

Sanna/ September 22, 2016/ Conference, Security

The blue/red pill analogy has been used a lot when it comes to hypervisor security and virtualisation. While there are reliable ways to determine if your code runs in a hypervisor or not, the underlying problem still persists. How do you know if the platform your code runs on watches every single move, i.e. instruction or data? Given the discussion of backdoors in hardware, this threat is real. Mikhail Utin discussed his findings at DeepSec 2014. He discovered manipulation of the BIOS in certain server systems. The hardware was probably affected, too. Two years later he presents his research covering the detection of malicious hypervisors in parts of your infrastructure where they should not be. Utilizing the definition of vulnerability as “inability to resist a threat” we want to update our consideration of three

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DeepSec2016 Workshop: Secure Web Development – Marcus Niemietz

Sanna/ September 21, 2016/ Development, Security, Training

The World Wide Web is everywhere. It has become the standard protocol for transferring data, accessing applications, configuring devices, controlling software, or even multimedia streaming. Most software development can’t be done without web applications. Despite the easy concept the technologies used in „HTTP/HTTPS“ have grown in very complex beasts. Few get it right, lots of developers make mistakes and end up at the wrong side of a security presentation at a conference. Fortunately there is help. We offer you a workshop at DeepSec 2016 to make your web software development great again! The “Secure Web Development” training by Marcus Niemietz systematically covers the OWASP Top 10 threats as well as threats, which may be important in the future (e.g. HTML5 and AngularJS attacks). At the end of the training each attendee will be able to create her/his

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: 802.11 Complexity. An Introduction to 802.11 Protocol Chaos – Andrés Blanco

Sanna/ September 20, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Security

Do you remember the days of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP)? One might almost say security design was bad back then. The question is: Has it really improved? Proper encryption and authentication is only a part of the design. In the case of wireless networking there is a whole lot more to consider. Shooting clients off the network is still possible. Penetration testers can tell you much more about the quirks and weaknesses of wireless protocols. This is why we asked Andrés Blanco to give a presentation about the state of wireless affairs. WiFi is everywhere and everyone is using it everyday. Employees connect to enterprise networks using their mobile devices, and later the same day to a WiFi network at a coffee shop or their home network. WiFi networks give users mobility and wire-less

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Last Call for Early Bird Tickets – DeepSec 2016

René Pfeiffer/ September 20, 2016/ Administrivia, Conference

We are back from 44CON and thoroughly enjoyed our time in London. The keynotes were great. The presenters showed a lot of interesting thoughts and facts you can use for attack and defence. Furthermore the conversations with attendees and speakers were very fruitful. You really cannot plan what you will be talking about. This is why you should attend conferences. And this is why you should book your DeepSec tickets now! Early bird registration is still possible. Make the most out of it. Don’t wait until the last minute! If you are interested in attending workshops, book as soon as possible! Trainings have a minimum number of participants. You have been warned. Either way, we are looking forward to see you at DeepSec 2016!

Firmware Threats – House of Keys

René Pfeiffer/ September 10, 2016/ Discussion, Security

SEC Consult, our long-term supporter, has updated a report on the use of encryption keys in firmware. These hardcoded cryptographic secrets pose a serious threat to information security. The report features 50 different vendors and has some interesting statistics. The results were coordinated with CERT/CC in order to inform the vendors about the problem. The highlights of the research includes: 40% increase in devices on the web using known private keys for HTTPS server certificates 331 certificates and 553 individual private keys (accessible via Github) some crypto material is used by 500,000 and 280,000 devices on the web as of now The recommendations are crystal clear: Make sure that each device uses random and unique cryptographic material. If operating systems can change account passphrases after initialisation, so can your device. Take care of management

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DeepSec 2016 Workshop: Deploying Secure Applications with TLS – Juraj Somorovsky

Sanna/ September 9, 2016/ Security, Training

Cryptography is all around us. It has become something like the background radiation of the networked world. We use it on a daily basis. Since nothing usually comes into existence by mistake, there must be someone responsible for deploying this crypto stuff. You are right. Software developers, mathematicians, engineers, system administrators, and many more people are involved to make encryption happen. The hard part is to get it right. The mathematics involved is hard. A lot can go wrong. This is why we have a workshop for you at DeepSec 2016! Have you (or your manager) ever wondered why your server is getting bad grades from SSL labs? Or are you interested in improving the performance of your TLS server? If you answer one of these question with “yes”, you should consider to take part in the

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: CSP Is Dead, Long Live Strict CSP! – Lukas Weichselbaum

Sanna/ September 8, 2016/ Conference

The Content Security Policy (CSP) is an additional layer of security for web applications. It is intended to detect and mitigate certain types of attacks. CSP is deployed by using the HTTP Content-Security-Policy header for publishing a policy. The policy instructs the web client how various resources will be used, where they come from, and the like. Violations of the policy can be reported to an application. Basically you can give the web client important hints what to expect. The reporting helps your intrusion detection process since the web clients usually understand the Web better than IDS modules. Lukas Weichselbaum is working at Google, and he will explain how CSP can be bypassed. In this presentation I’ll highlight the major roadblocks that make CSP deployment difficult. I talk about common mistakes, about how we automatically bypassed

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DeepSec2016 Talk: badGPO – Using GPOs for Persistence and Lateral Movement – Yves Kraft & Immanuel Willi

Sanna/ September 7, 2016/ Conference, Development, Security

System administration has evolved a lot during the past decades. Instead of enjoying long walks through the forests of servers and clients, the modern sysadmin controls the whole infrastructure by policies. Most operating systems can take advantage of this technology. As with software upgrades, these tools can make your life easier – or help an intruder to get a firm hold onto your infrastructure. Malicious activity can exploit your management networks/systems. Once this happens, you are in deep trouble. We have invited two security experts who created a demonstration. They used the Microsoft® Windows platform in combination with native tools: Group Policy is a feature which provides centralized management and configuration functions for the Microsoft operating system, application, and user settings. Group Policy is simply the easiest way to reach out and configure computer

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DeepSec 2016 Talk: Machine Duping – Pwning Deep Learning Systems – Clarence Chio

Sanna/ September 6, 2016/ Conference, Security

Give a man a computer, and you 0wn him for a day. Teach a man to employ machine learning, and he will have to battle Skynet for a lifetime. This quote might not be the exact copy of the original, but it will do. Machine now learn stuff. Hence the are of machine learning is the new playground for start-ups, old school companies, researchers, and hackers, of course. A new era of sapiosexual attraction to artificial minds has begun. Information security is not spared. Algorithms have long been a part of defence. Now they are being used with machine learning. Since algorithms and machines run on networked computers, they can be attacked. At DeepSec 2016 Clarence Chio will explain to you how it can be done. Deep learning and neural networks have gained incredible

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Of Clouds & Cyber: A little Story about Wording in InfoSec

René Pfeiffer/ September 5, 2016/ Discussion, High Entropy

In case you ever received a message about our calls for papers, you may have noticed that we do not like the word cyber. Of course we know that it is used widely. Information security experts are divided if it should be used. Some do it, some reject it, some don’t know what to do about it. We use it mostly in italics or like this: „cyber“. There is a reason why, but first let’s take a look where the word comes from. The Oxford Dictionaries blog mentions the origin in the word cybernetics. This word was used in the 1940 by scientists from the fields of engineering, social sciences, and biology. Cybernetics deals with the study of communication and control systems in living beings and machines. Hence the word is derived from the

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Deep Sec2016 Talk: DROWN – Breaking TLS using SSLv2 – Nimrod Aviram

Sanna/ September 5, 2016/ Conference, Internet

In the past years encrypted communication has been subject to intense scrutiny by researchers. With the advent of Transport Layer Security (TLS) Internet communication via HTTP became a lot more secure. Its predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must not be used any more. The real world has its own ideas. SSLv2 and SSLv3 is still present. Attackers can try to downgrade the TLS session by switching to insecure ciphers. When using the correct configuration, these downgrade attacks cannot happen. The question is: Are all of your devices, applications, and systems correctly configure? If you are not sure, better check again. In order to illustrate how these attacks work, we have invited Nimrod Aviram for DeepSec 2016. He will explain the inner workings of the DROWN attack. We present a novel cross-protocol attack on TLS

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DeepSec2016 Workshop: Offensive iOS Exploitation – Marco Lancini

Sanna/ September 4, 2016/ Conference, Training

If an iPhone gets exploited in the forest and no one is around to 0wn it, does it worry you? This philosophical question has been answered sufficiently by the latest Pegasus incident. All smartphone should worry you. The iPhone and its operating system is no exception. Actually breaking a smartphone give an attacker a lot of advantages. Chances are that you carry the exploited device with you all the time. At last the Age of Mobility has reached information security! In order to develop exploits you need a healthy dose of software development and a (deep) knowledge of the platform being attacked. For those of you who do a lot of penetratoion testing, security analysis, or plain software quality management, we have a shortcut for you: the iOS exploitation workshop. This is an exercise-driven

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