1211, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: The IPv6 Snort Plugin

René Pfeiffer/ November 12, 2014/ Conference, Internet

The deployment of the new Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is gathering momentum. A lot of applications now have IPv6 capabilities. This includes security software. Routers and firewall systems were first, now there are also plugins and filters available for intrusion detection software such as Snort. Martin Schütte will present the IPv6 Snort Plugin at DeepSec 2014. We have asked him to give us an overview of what to expect. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk! Main research for my talk was done in 2011. I am quite surprised (and a little bit frightened) by how little the field of IPv6 security has developed since then. It is often easier to build attack tools than to defend against them. But to improve IPv6 network security we urgently need more detection

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2910, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: Build Yourself a Risk Assessment Tool

Sanna/ October 29, 2014/ Conference, Interview

„The only advice I might give to everyone who is responsible for information security is that it is never about a tool or a methodology“, says Vlado Luknar. The never-ending quest for the “best” tool or methodology is a futile exercise. In the end it is you, the security specialist, who adds the most value to a risk assessment (RA) / threat modelling process for your company, claims Vlado Luknar (Orange Slovensko a.s. / France Telecom Orange Group).  In his talk at DeepSec Mr. Luknar will demonstrate that it is quite easy to capture your overall security knowledge in a home-made, free-of-charge tool.  But first, let’s ask Mr. Luknar a couple of questions: 1) Mr. Luknar, please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk! There is no problem with understanding existing RA

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2810, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: Cloud-based Data Validation Patterns… We need a new Approach!

Sanna/ October 28, 2014/ Conference, Interview

Data validation threats (e.g. sensitive data, injection attacks) account for the vast majority of security issues in any system, including cloud-based systems. Current methodology in nearly every organisation is to create data validation gates. But when an organisation implements a cloud-based strategy, these security-quality gates may inadvertently become bypassed or suppressed. Everyone relying on these filters should know how they can fail and what it means to your flow of data. Geoffrey Hill has been in the IT industry since 1990, when he developed and sold a C++ application to measure risk in the commodities markets in New York City. He was recently employed by Cigital Inc., a company that specializes in incorporating secure engineering development frameworks into the software development life-cycles of client organizations.  He was leading the software security initiative at a major phone

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2010, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: Safer Six – IPv6 Security in a Nutshell

René Pfeiffer/ October 20, 2014/ Conference, Internet, Interview

The Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is the successor to the currently main IP Version 4 (IPv4). IPv6 was designed to address the need for more addresses and for a better routing of packets in a world filled with billions of networks and addresses alike. Once you decide to develop a new protocol, you have the chance to avoid all the mistakes of the past. You can even design security features from the start. That’s the theory. In practice IPv6 has had its fair share of security problems. There has been a lot of research, several vulnerabilities have been discussed at various security conferences. DeepSec 2014 features a presentation called Safer Six – IPv6 Security in a Nutshell held by Johanna Ullrich of SBA Research, a research centre for information security based in Vienna.

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1410, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Workshop: Hacking Web Applications – Case Studies of Award-Winning Bugs

René Pfeiffer/ October 14, 2014/ Conference, Training

The World Wide Web has spread vastly since the 1990s. Web technology has developed a lot of methods, and the modern web site of today has little in common with the early static HTML shop windows. The Web can do more. A lot of applications can be accessed by web browsers, because it is easier in terms of having a client available on most platforms. Of course, sometimes things go wrong, bugs bite, and you might find your web application and its data exposed to the wrong hands. This is where you and your trainer Dawid Czagan come in. We offer you a Web Application Hacking training at DeepSec 2014. Have you ever thought of hacking web applications for fun and profit? How about playing with authentic, award-winning bugs identified in some of the

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1410, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Workshop: Understanding x86-64 Assembly for Reverse Engineering and Exploits

René Pfeiffer/ October 14, 2014/ Training

Assembly language is still a vital tool for software projects. While you can do a lot much easier with all the high level languages, the most successful exploits still use carefully designed opcodes. It’s basically just bytes that run on your CPU. The trick is to get the code into position, and there are lots of ways to do this. In case you are interested, we can recommend the training at DeepSec held by Xeno Kovah, Lead InfoSec Engineer at The MITRE Corporation. Why should you be interested in assembly language? Well, doing reverse engineering and developing exploits is not all you can do with this knowledge. Inspecting code (or data that can be used to transport code in disguise) is part of information security. Everyone accepts a set of data from the outside

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0210, 2014

RandomPic XSA-108

Mika/ October 2, 2014/ High Entropy, RandomPic

What a couple of Infosec people thought about XSA-108. Apparently some were a little bit disappointed that XSA-108 affects “only” HVM. Sorry, not another catastrophy, not another heartbleed, Shellshock or something in this class. Only a vulnerability which potentially allows access to other VMs. Anyway, time for an update! (Idea shamelessly stolen from aloria)

2509, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Workshop: Suricata Intrusion Detection/Prevention Training

René Pfeiffer/ September 25, 2014/ Conference, Internet, Training

Getting to know what’s going on is a primary goal of information security. There is even a name for it: intrusion detection. And there are tools to do this. That’s the easy part. Once you have decided you want intrusion detection or intrusion prevention, the implementation part becomes a lot more difficult. Well, if you need help with this issue, there is a two-day workshop for you at DeepSec 2014 – the Suricata Training Event. Suricata is a high performance Network Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and Network Security Monitoring engine. It can serve pretty much all your needs. It’s Open Source (so it cannot be bought and removed from the market) and owned by a very active community. Suricata is managed by the non-profit foundation; the Open Information Security Foundation

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2409, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: A Myth or Reality – BIOS-based Hypervisor Threat

René Pfeiffer/ September 24, 2014/ Conference, High Entropy

Backdoors are devious. Usually you have to look for them since someone has hidden or „forgotten“ them. Plus backdoors are very fashionable these days. You should definitely get one or more. Software is (very) easy to inspect for any rear entrances. Even if you don’t have access to the source code, you can deconstruct the bytes and eventually look for suspicious parts of the code. When it comes to hardware, things might get complicated. Accessing code stored in hardware can be complex. Besides it isn’t always clear which one of the little black chips holds the real code you are looking for. Since all of our devices we use every days runs on little black chips (the colour doesn’t matter, really), everyone with trust issues should make sure that control of these devices is

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2109, 2014

Back from 44CON – Conference Impressions

René Pfeiffer/ September 21, 2014/ High Entropy, Security, Stories

If you haven’t been at 44CON last week, you missed a lot of good presentations. Plus you haven’t been around great speakers, an excellent crew, “gin o’clock” each day, wonderful audience, and great coffee from ANTIPØDE (where you should go when in London and in desperate need of good coffee). Everyone occasionally using wireless connections (regardless if Wi-Fi or mobile phone networks) should watch the talks on GreedyBTS and the improvements of doing Wi-Fi penetration testing by using fake alternative access points. GreedyBTS is a base transceiver station (BTS) enabling 2G/2.5G attacks by impersonating a BTS. Hacker Fantastic explained the theoretical background and demonstrated what a BTS-in-the-middle can do to Internet traffic of mobile phones. Intercepting and re-routing text messages and voice calls can be done, too. Implementing the detection of fake base stations

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1709, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: Why Anti-Virus Software fails

René Pfeiffer/ September 17, 2014/ Conference

Filtering inbound and outbound data is most certainly a part of your information security infrastructure. A prominent component are anti-virus content filters. Your desktop clients probably have one. Your emails will be first read by these filters. While techniques like this have been around for a long time, they regularly draw criticism. According to some opinions the concept of anti-virus is dead. Nevertheless it’s still a major building block of security architecture. The choice can be hard, though. DeepSec 2014 features a talk by Daniel Sauder, giving you an idea why anti-virus software can  fail. Someone who is starting to think about anti-virus evasion will see, that this can be reached easy (see for example last year’s DeepSec talk by Attila Marosi). If an attacker wants to hide a binary executable file with a

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1609, 2014

DeepSec 2014 Talk: Advanced Powershell Threat – Lethal Client Side Attacks

René Pfeiffer/ September 16, 2014/ Conference

Modern environments feature a lot of platforms that can execute code by a variety of frameworks. There are UNIX® shells, lots of interpreted languages, macros of all kinds (Office applications or otherwise), and there is the Microsoft Windows PowerShell. Once you find a client, you usually will find a suitable scripting engine. This is very important for defending networks and – of course – attacking them. Nikhil Mittal will present ways to use the PowerShell in order to attack networks from the inside via the exploitation of clients. PowerShell is the “official” shell and scripting language for Windows. It is installed by default on all post-Vista Windows systems and is found even on XP and Windows 2003 machines in an enterprise network. Built on the .NET framework, PowerShell allows interaction with almost everything one

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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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