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.

2209, 2011

Press Release: How Terrorists encrypt, tenuous Security Situations concerning GSM Networks and IPv6 under Attack

René Pfeiffer/ September 22, 2011/ Press

Press release: From the 15th until the 18th of November international IT-security experts and hackers will meet again in Vienna, Austria, to discuss strategic security topics. The schedule is confirmed: At this year’s international IT-security conference DeepSec, the main focus lies on strategic security topics. DeepSec 2011 takes place from the 15th-18th of November, it’ll be the 5th time that world’s elite in network-security and hacking comes together. Encryption techniques used by terrorists, secure use of mobile devices and the security awareness of their users as well as future security-infrastructures are main topics of this year’s DeepSec. “As in the years before we want to present exciting and controversial topics which concern not only experts, but most of us directly or indirectly in 7 workshops and 34 talks.” says René Pfeiffer, organiser of DeepSec.

2109, 2011

Talk: Intelligent Bluetooth fuzzing – Why bother?

René Pfeiffer/ September 21, 2011/ Conference, Security

Bluetooth devices and software implementations have been a fruitful playground for security researchers for years. You probably remember the PoC code from the trinifite.group and other bugs dragged out into the open. Riding public transport often led to Bluetooth scanning with tools such as Blooover. But that’s all past and gone. Software has evolved. Developers have learned. Modern quality assurance won’t let this happen again. Sadly this is fiction. Tommi Mäkilä has some stories to share about the state of Bluetooth: „Bluetooth robustness is wretched, no surprise there. Bluetooth test results from plugfests show 80% failure rate, eight out of ten tests end with a crash. It is not pretty, it is sad and frustrating. For a moment, few years back, there seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel: the failures

2009, 2011

Talk: IT Security Compliance Management can be done right

René Pfeiffer/ September 20, 2011/ Conference

Your IT infrastructure needs more than hardware or software. If your IT landscape is big enough you already know that. The question how to tackle compliance management remains. What kind of internal and external controls from regulations and other sources are there? What is IT-Risk and IT-Compliance management? Why and for whom does it matter? How can we handle it and how does compliance aggregation fit into the picture? First of all, you need to know whats in your environment, what assets your organisation consists of. How do you want to protect something if you don’t know it exists? Also make sure you know where it is. Charting the access paths to data is not a trivial task. Then you need to know the risk appetite of your company. How much risk are you

1909, 2011

Talk: Windows Pwn 7 OEM – Owned Every Mobile?

René Pfeiffer/ September 19, 2011/ Conference

Windows Phone is an operating system for mobile phones. Similar to other operating systems it has security features such as sandboxing applications, APIs for exchanging data across applications and isolation of storage built in. It also offer methods for encrypting data on the phone itself. There’s more documentation out in the Internet or directly available at Microsoft’s web site. So, this is good, right? In theory, yes. In practice currently very little public information is available about Windows Phone 7 OS security preventing adequate determination of the risk exposed by WP7 devices. This does not refer to the documentation. It’s all about assessing risks, and risk assessment can’t be done by looking at APIs. Alex Plaskett will talk about WP7 security in-depth. He will address the ever increasing challenges and stages of exploitation an

1809, 2011

Talk: How To Rob An Online Bank And Get Away With It

René Pfeiffer/ September 18, 2011/ Conference

We’ve all heard of – or have even been a victim of – attacks against online banking users where malware on their computers stole their identities and transferred their money to offshore mules’ accounts. While such attacks are still possible and will probably remain a viable threat, they suffer from severe limitations: the loot is limited by the amount of money on victims’ accounts, attacks only work against more gullible people and banks are employing security measures that make identity theft increasingly difficult. From the attacker’s point of view this is very undesirable. These factors create incentive for criminals to focus on online banking servers. Incidentally, that’s where – as famous bank robber Willie Sutton might say – all the money is. Now, Mr. Sutton lived in the times of physical currency and had

1509, 2011

Talk: Reassemble or GTFO! – IDS Evasion Strategies

René Pfeiffer/ September 15, 2011/ Conference

Ever since network intrusion technology was introduced, attackers have tried to evade detection. The tactics for evasion changed over time, but there really was no point in the past when evasion was not discussed. This is especially true for all things HTTP, because web applications transmit a rich set of data between server and client (and vice versa). The aim of evasion is to confuse the sensor and to thwart the inspection process itself. Designers have come up with ways to normalise data by reassembly of packets or rewriting content to establish matching with a baseline in terms of data formatting. Attackers usually supply data to an IDS that will never be factored in at the receiving end (evasion by insertion), or by confusing an IDS’s very process of reconstructing the data stream. The attacks

1409, 2011

Talk: An online Game Trojan Framework from China Underground Market

René Pfeiffer/ September 14, 2011/ Conference

Malware infecting computers always serves a purpose. Zombies, as infected systems are called, usually connect to a Command & Control channel and receive their orders from the owners of the zombie herd. Malicious software can also be used as a tool for retrieving information. Some of these tools are specialised and look for specific data such as login credentials. At DeepSec 2011 Hermes Li will explain how a trojan horse designed for stealing user information is installed, how it works and give a short introduction into the Chinese underground market. The talk will also discuss parts of the code, DLL injection and the packer encryption. There is a market for most stolen data. When it comes to games there is even real money in data trafficking. In-game goods (items, currencies, …) can be sold,

1209, 2011

Workshop: The Art of Exploiting Injection Flaws

René Pfeiffer/ September 12, 2011/ Conference

If you have ever developed a web application you know that attackers try to exploit requests to the web server in order to inject commands sent to a database server. This attack is called SQL injection. It is done by modifying data sent through web forms or parameters that are part of a request to a web server. In theory web developers learn to avoid mistakes leading to SQL injection. In practice not every developer has the skill or the tools to prevent SQL injection due to lack of knowledge. Validating data can be hard if the data is badly defined or if the building blocks of the web application do not offer ways to normalise or sanitise data. Most developers might not even know if the frameworks they are using protects them or

1009, 2011

Workshop: Attacks on GSM Networks

René Pfeiffer/ September 10, 2011/ Conference

The topic of GSM networks has been discussed at past DeepSec conferences right from the very first event in 2007. Recent years saw a significant increase of research in GSM attacks: The weaknesses of A5/1 encryption have been demonstrated and exploited, several GPRS networks in Europe have been shown to be insecure, and an ever-growing number of Open Source projects in the area of GSM and GPRS are gaining significant attraction. Despite the availability of attack methods, the tools are often hard to use for security professionals due to their limited documentation. The published attacks are often difficult to reimplement when assessing the vulnerability of GSM networks. This is exactly why DeepSec 2011 offers a two-day training on attacking GSM networks. Attendees will spend about half the time re-visiting the key aspects of GSM’s

0809, 2011

Talk: SMS Fuzzing – SIM Toolkit Attack

René Pfeiffer/ September 8, 2011/ Conference

We’re pretty sure that you own a mobile phone and that you send and receive text messages. Do you feel at risk or somehow threatened? If not, then you might want to reconsider your opinion. Cell phones, no matter if dumb or smart, are always connected to the mobile phone network. This means that they can receive messages and commands from the network. The security of GSM has already been explored in past DeepSec conferences. There’s a chance that you are prone to attacks. Let’s stick to text messages. At DeepSec 2011 we will show how to make a phone send an SMS message without the user’s consent and how to make the phone not to receive any message. The method used works on any phone, no matter if it’s a smartphone or not

0709, 2011

Talk: Insight Into the Russian Black Market

René Pfeiffer/ September 7, 2011/ Conference

You have all heard the term cybercrime, and you have heard about all things cybercrime – stolen credentials, data theft, fraud, blackmail and more. You may have heard the there are markets for goods connected to computer crime. You may have heard that there’s a lot of money in it (enough to pay off the national debts of most states including the USA, if you total all reports on damages by cybercrime). As usual the problems lie in connecting the dots. What are the mechanisms behind these black markets? What are the goods? Who pays for them and by which means? Surely you cannot just walk into a chat room, drop your credit card number and part with the digital loot, or can you? What if you end up being a trade object yourself?

0609, 2011

Talk/Workshop: IPv6 Security In-Depth

René Pfeiffer/ September 6, 2011/ Conference

The tale of two protocol suites has been being written for some time now. The IPv4 Internet has run out of fresh addresses. The IPv6 deployment has begun, but it will take some time before IPv4 is completely phased out (if ever). The work on the IPv6 protocol started in the early 1990s with the temporary IP Next Generation Working Group, collecting proposals. In theory IPv6 addresses many shortcomings of IPv4 and consists of a thoroughly well-designed protocol suite with security in mind. In practice you will neither just switch to IPv6 nor skip the step where you consider the security implications. There is no zero conf mechanism when it comes to security. All businesses need to know what the security impact of IPv6 really is. Some networks have already deployed IPv6, others think

0509, 2011

Talk: The Management of IT Threats. European Digital Agenda’s Weakness

René Pfeiffer/ September 5, 2011/ Conference

In case you haven’t heard about it, there is a digital agenda for the coming decade, developed by the European Commission. Cited from the web site: Europe 2020 is the EU’s growth strategy for the coming decade. In a changing world, we want the EU to become a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. These three mutually reinforcing priorities should help the EU and the Member States deliver high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion. Concretely, the Union has set five ambitious objectives – on employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate/energy – to be reached by 2020. Each Member State has adopted its own national targets in each of these areas. Concrete actions at EU and national levels underpin the strategy. The strategy includes a strong coordination between public and private institutions, located

0409, 2011

Encrypted Communication with DeepSec

René Pfeiffer/ September 4, 2011/ Administrivia

For all of you who do not pay close attention to our contact section on our web site, we offer various way to communicate via encrypted messages. We have published two GPG keys, one for our role account (key 0x22860969) and one for a person from our organisation team (key 0x6E4037AF). Use PGP/MIME format if possible (ASCII armour is so old school ☺). We have set up an e-mail forwarding service via privacybox.de. You can use a standard web form, a form suited for mobile clients and a form reachable via a TOR hidden service. While we have no idea how privacybox.de handle their own security, it’s a nice service. You can always double- or triple-encrypt if in doubt. When on IRC (channel #deepsec on irc.freenode.net, usually most active prior to and shortly after

About René Pfeiffer

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