About René Pfeiffer

System administrator, lecturer, hacker, security consultant, technical writer and DeepSec organisation team member. Has done some particle physics, too. Prefers encrypted messages for the sake of admiring the mathematical algorithms at work.

1209, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: Trusting Your Cloud Provider – Protecting Private Virtual Machines

René Pfeiffer/ September 12, 2014/ Conference

The „Cloud“ technology has been in the news recently. No matter if you use „The Cloud™“ or any other technology for outsourcing data, processes and computing, you probably don’t want to forget about trust issues. Scattering all your documents across the Internet doesn’t require a „Cloud“ provider (you only need to click on that email with the lottery winnings). Outsourcing any part of your information technology sadly requires a trust relationship. How do you solve this problem? Armin Simma of the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences has some ideas and will present them at DeepSec 2014. Th presentation shows a combination of technologies on how to make clouds trustworthy. One of the top inhibitors for not moving (virtual machines) to the cloud is security. Cloud customers do not fully trust cloud providers. The problem

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1109, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: An innovative and comprehensive Framework for Social Vulnerability Assessment

René Pfeiffer/ September 11, 2014/ Conference

Do you get a lot of email? Do customers and business partners send you documents? Do you talk to people on the phone? Then you might be interested in an assessment of your vulnerability by social interactions. We are proud to host a presentation by Enrico Frumento of CEFRIEL covering this topic. As anyone probably knows nowadays spear-phishing is probably the most effective threat, and it is often used as a first step of most sophisticated attacks. Even recent JP Morgan Chase’s latest data breach seems to be originated by a single employee (just one was enough!) who was targeted by a contextualized mail. Into this new scenario it is hence of paramount importance to consider the human factor into companies’ risk analysis. However, is any company potentially vulnerable to these kind attacks? How

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1009, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: Build Yourself a Risk Assessment Tool

René Pfeiffer/ September 10, 2014/ Conference

All good defences start with some good ideas. The is also true for information security. DeepSec 2014 features a presentation by Vlado Luknar who will give you decent hints and a guideline on how to approach the dreaded risk assessment with readily available tools. We have kindly asked Vlado to give you a detailed teaser on what to expect: It seems fairly obvious that every discussion about information security starts with a risk assessment. Otherwise, how do we know what needs to be protected, how much effort and resources we should put into preventing security incidents and potential business disasters? With limited time and budget at hand we’d better know very well where to look first and what matters the most. If we look at some opinion-making bodies in information security, such as ISF,

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0909, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: MLD Considered Harmful – Breaking Another IPv6 Subprotocol

René Pfeiffer/ September 9, 2014/ Conference, Internet

In case you haven’t noticed, the Internet is getting crowded. Next to having billions of people online, their devices are starting to follow. Information security experts can’t wait to see this happen. The future relies on the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6). IPv6 features a lot of improvements over IPv4. Since you cannot get complex stuff right at the first time, IPv6 brings some security implications with it. Past and present conferences have talked about this. DeepSec 2014 is no exception. Enno Rey of ERNW will talk about Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) in his presentation. The presentation is the first time that the results of an ongoing research of MLD are published. MLD is a protocol belonging to the IPv6 family, and sadly it features insecurities. MLD (Multicast Listener Discovery), and its successor, MLDv2,

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0809, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Keynote: The Measured CSO

René Pfeiffer/ September 8, 2014/ Conference

It’s good if your organisation has someone to take on information security. However it’s bad if you are the person in this position. Few are lucky enough to actually deal with improving information security. And some are caught in compliance fighting an uphill struggle against regulations and audits that have nothing to do with the threats to your business. The management of Information Security has become over-regulated and to some degree, over-focused on compliance to policy/regulation, architectural decisions, network access, and vulnerability management. As a result, many CISOs struggle to define success in terms that match the goals of their business, and struggle to make their risk management efforts relevant to senior executives. How do you achieve that? Alex Hutton will tell you in his keynote talk at DeepSec 2014. His goal is for

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0509, 2014

EuroTrashSecurity Podcast – Microtrash37 : DeepSec 2014 Content

René Pfeiffer/ September 5, 2014/ Conference

Microtrash37 of the EuroTrashSecurity podcast is out! We had a little talk with Chris about the schedule of DeepSec 2014 and what to expect. It’s a teaser for the blog articles about the talks and the trainings to come. We will describe more details on the blog, but you get a good overview what to expect from the audio. We also got some inside information on the upcoming BSidesVienna 0x7DE. We will definitely attend and so should you! The BSidesVienna has some cool surprises for you. Don’t miss out on the chance to get together. The Call for Papers is still open! If you have something to share, please consider submitting a talk.

2708, 2014

BSidesVienna 2014 – Call for Papers still open

René Pfeiffer/ August 27, 2014/ Call for Papers, Conference

BSidesVienna is back! And the organisation team is looking for talks. BSidesVienna was started in 2011. There were some smaller BSides-like events in Vienna in the past two years. BSidesVienna 2014 is planned for the 22 November 2014 (right after DeepSec 2014). The call for papers will close on 30 September 2014, so if you have interesting stuff you want to show onstage, then submit it to the BSidesVienna team. You can’t keep a good con down… so let’s have fun and infosec talks at BSidesVienna 2014!

2708, 2014

Preliminary Schedule of DeepSec 2014 published

René Pfeiffer/ August 27, 2014/ Administrivia, Conference

After weeks of hard work we have now the preliminary schedule of DeepSec 2014 online! We received over hundred submissions, and we had to navigate through a lot of publications, abstracts and references. We hope that you like the mixture of topics. We especially hope that you will find the offered trainings interesting. We still wait for content and corrections, so bear with us while the schedule takes its final form. Contrary to the past years we had a lot more to do in terms of completing information about submitted talks and trainings. We will tell you more about this in the upcoming blog articles (which we will announce on our Twitter account, so you don’t miss anything). Looking forward to see you in Vienna in November!

0108, 2014

Reviewing all your Submissions for DeepSec 2014

René Pfeiffer/ August 1, 2014/ Administrivia, Conference

The Call for Papers of DeepSec 2014 officially ended yesterday. We are currently reviewing all your submissions and will publish the preliminary schedule in the course of the next two weeks. As always, you did a very good job of finding things to break and to exploit. Our choice what to include in the schedule will be pretty hard! For those who still have bright ideas and no time to submit, please send us your abstracts as soon as possible! We will consider everything submitted so far first, but we will take your proposals into account. You just need to tell us.

0307, 2014

Reminder: Call for Papers DeepSec 2014

René Pfeiffer/ July 3, 2014/ Call for Papers, Conference

The Call for Papers of DeepSec 2014 is still open. Since its motto is the power of knowledge we address everyone having knowledge. Information is the „cyber“ weapon of the 21rst century, we have heard. So if you know about the 0day that affects half the Internet, you should definitely think about presenting it at DeepSec 2014. ☻ Seriously, we have chosen this motto, because a lot of issues in information security deal with knowledge. If your IT staff knows about the latest threats, the capabilities of the defences, the state of the systems, and how to deal with problems, then you have a distinct advantage. Not knowing is usually the first step of running into problems. In this tradition we prefer disclosure of security-related knowledge. The dreaded CVE-2014-0160 is a good example. Imagine OpenSSL

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1806, 2014

Ticket Registration is open

René Pfeiffer/ June 18, 2014/ Administrivia, Conference

The ticket registration for DeepSec 2014 „The Octave“ is open. You can either use the embedded version on the DeepSec web site or go directly to the ticketing site. The tickets are now available for the early bird tariff. Make sure you get your tickets as soon as possible. The later tariffs are more expensive. The current Call for Papers for DeepSec 2014 (and DeepINTEL 2015) is open, and we are looking for talks applying the power of knowledge to information security. Would you like to know more?

2705, 2014

IT Security without Borders

René Pfeiffer/ May 27, 2014/ Discussion, Internet

U.S. government officials are considering to prevent Chinese nationals from attending hacking and IT security conferences by denying visas. The ideas is „to curb Chinese cyber espionage“. While this initiative has been widely criticised and the measure is very easy to circumvent, it doesn’t come as a surprise. Recent years have shown that hacking has become more and more political. This aspect was already explored in the keynote of DeepSec 2012. So what is the real problem? Espionage, be it „cyber“ or not, revolves around information. This is exactly why we have a problem with the word „cyber“. Methods of transporting information have been around for a long time. Guglielmo Marconi and Heinrich Hertz raised problems for information security long before the Internet did. The only difference is the ease of setting up Internet

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0505, 2014

DeepSec 2014 “The Power of Knowledge” – Call for Papers

René Pfeiffer/ May 5, 2014/ Call for Papers

After a couple of months tinkering behind the scenes we can finally open our Call for Papers for DeepSec 2014! The upcoming DeepSec 2014 will be in November at our well-known conference hotel. We accept submissions as of now, and we are keen to hear your ideas. To give you some thoughts on what we are looking for: DeepSec 2014 is all about the Power of Knowledge! The past years have shown that knowledge is a true „cyber“ weapon. Everyone recalling the endless discussions about full/responsible/no/delayed disclosure of bugs affecting the security of IT systems can relate to the power of knowledge. Other might not be so lucky and grasp what knowledge means when turned into exploits and compromised systems. This is why we want your contribution to DeepSec 2014 centred around knowledge. Let’s

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0305, 2014

BSidesLondon 2014 Rookie Track Videos

René Pfeiffer/ May 3, 2014/ Conference

We are back from the BSidesLondon 2014, and we had a great time. It was good to meet everyone to get some new ideas and to work on old ideas too. The Rookie Track was a success. We had a hard time deciding which talk was best. We managed to find a winner which will be invited to attend DeepSec 2014. Congratulations to Georgi Boiko! The Rookie Track recordings will be published online depending on the choice of the speaker. Some are already online. Here is a list of talks you can already watch. More are being published in the coming weeks (we will update this list). A Look at Modern Warfare by @kaitlyn4495 The Joy of Passwords by Joseph Gwynne-Jones RFID Hacking – An Introduction by @d3sre Run-time tools to aid application security

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2504, 2014

BSidesLondon is near!

René Pfeiffer/ April 25, 2014/ Conference, Discussion

We will attend the BSidesLondon event, and we are looking forward to meet you there! DeepSec is again sponsoring the rookie track. We believe that information security can only benefit from fresh perspectives and newcomers that take a hard look at “well established” facts. This is why we support young infosec researchers and welcome their contribution. The  winner of the BSidesLondon rookie track will be invited to join DeepSec 2014. If you attend BSidesLondon, have a chat with MiKa or me. We are always looking for new talents, ideas to put more research into infosec research, and creativity to take apart facts everyone takes for granted. See you in London!