DeepSec 2018 Talk: DNS Exfiltration and Out-of-Band Attacks – Nitesh Shilpkar

Sanna/ August 27, 2018/ Conference, Security

“The Domain Name System or DNS is one of the most fundamental parts of the Internet”, says Nitesh Shipkar. “It is crucial for a billion of users daily to help us build presence on the internet using names humans can understand rather than IP addresses. However, DNS comes with security issues organizations should be aware of and take into consideration. Attackers are abusing the DNS to redirect traffic to malicious sites, communicate with command and control (C&C) servers, steal data from organizations and conduct massive attacks that cause harm to organizations. Many organizations are not prepared to mitigate, or even detect, the problems DNS might bring. Due to the criticality of DNS to maintain an Internet presence, access applications, connect to a network or simply send an email, everyone has the potential to be

Read More

DeepSec 2018 Conference “Smart is the new Cyber” – Preliminary Schedule published

René Pfeiffer/ August 17, 2018/ Conference, Schedule, Security

The preliminary schedule for DeepSec 2018 has been published. It took us some time to select and review all submissions. We cracked the 100 submissions mark, thus we are pleased that you made it very difficult for us this year. The number of slots for presentations and workshops has been constant. The number of content being submitted is steadily growing. So we hope we did a good job and that you find a pleasant mixture of topics (as pleasant as information security can get). All speakers have been informed. There may be some changes to the schedule which we will announce on our blog. The abstracts of every presentation and workshop will be discussed in-depth here on the blog as well. We have asked the trainers and speakers some questions. As soon as we

Read More

BSidesLondon 2018 Rookie Track Follow-Up

René Pfeiffer/ June 8, 2018/ Conference, Discussion, High Entropy

We would like to share some impressions about the BSidesLondon 2018 Rookie Track presentations. It gets hard and harder to tell which one of the talks is the best. And picking a winner is not the right approach. We do this, because we can only invite one person to DeepSec, and because the intention is to have a motivation to work hard on the presentation. From what we have seen, we were quite impressed. The quality has much improved, also thanks to the tireless efforts of the mentors (if you see someone with a mentor badge, please buy them a drink!). Apart from the 15 minute time slot some talks were hard to distinguish from their bigger cousins in the main tracks. The topics were well-chosen. The mix was great. Every single rookie did

Read More

DeepSec 2017 Presentation Slides

René Pfeiffer/ December 1, 2017/ Administrivia, Conference

While the videos are on their way to the rendering farm, the presentation slides for DeepSec 2017 can already be downloaded. We put them online as soon as we get the final version from our speakers. If you do some guessing URL-wise you can also find the presentations of past conferences at the very same spot. Since we collect the final slides after the conference and not ask speakers to put USB sticks into their computers during the conference, the download repository will fill in time. Unfortunately we cannot speed up this process. So bear with us, we are as curious as you (especially since some of us never get the see any presentation at DeepSec because there is too much to do). As for the videos, all speakers and attendees will also get

Read More

DeepSec2017 U21 Talk: Lessons Learned: How To (Not) Design Your Own Protocol – Nicolai Davidsson

Sanna/ November 15, 2017/ Conference, Development, Security

“One of the first lessons of cryptography is “don’t roll your own crypto” but we were bold enough to ignore it”, says Nicolai. “Single Sign-On is so 2016 which is why we’d like to introduce its replacement, Forever Alone Sign-On – FASO. This talk will discuss one of the ugliest SSO solutions you’ll ever see, its updated, slightly less ugly, iteration, and, ultimately, FASO. We’ll discuss the use cases, questionable decisions made during the planning process, the actual self-rolled, totally vulnerable, cryptography, and the even worse code architecture. In all seriousness: The talk reflects on the design process of a SSO protocol and its first two iterations, going from a semi-functional workaround to an experimental OAuth-and-the-like alternative utilizing pre-shared keys, symmetric cryptography and implicit authentication.”   Nicolai is a security researcher at zyantific and

Read More

ROOTS: Out-Of-Order Execution As A Cross-VM Side Channel And Other Applications – Sophia d’Antoine

Sanna/ November 15, 2017/ Conference, Security

Given the rise in popularity of cloud computing and platform-as-a-service, vulnerabilities, inherent to systems which share hardware resources, will become increasingly attractive targets to malicious software authors. In this talk, Sophia will introduce a novel side channel across virtual machines through the detection of out-of-order execution. She and her colleagues created a simple duplex channel as well as a broadcast channel. She’ll discuss possible adversaries for this channel and proposes further work to make this channel more secure, efficient and applicable in realistic scenarios. In addition, she considers seven possible malicious applications of this channel: theft of encryption keys, program identification, environmental keying, malicious triggers, denial of service attacks, determining VM co-location, malicious data injection, and side channels. We asked Sophia a few questions about her talk. Please tell us the top 5 facts

Read More

DeepSec 2017 Talk: OpenDXL In Active Response Scenarios – Tarmo Randel

Sanna/ November 15, 2017/ Conference

Automating response to cyber security incidents is the trend which is – considering increasing amount of incidents organizations handle and ever-increasing attack surface – already becoming mainstream. In this talk Tarmo explores the options of using OpenDXL in real life situation of mixed environments, legacy solutions and multiple vendors for connecting existing (and future) cyber security system components for coordinated information exchange and orchestrating incident response action. Tarmo is a researcher at NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence, various research projects and developing for large scale cyber exercises. He’s also a developer at the Estonian eHealth Foundations, “Kickstarting” in-house development team. Tarmo’s creating supporting infrastructure, preparations and execution of plans for taking over selected external vendor development projects. He’s Head of Department at CERT-EE, Running Computer Emergency Response Team, Information security expert at CERT-EE,

Read More

DeepSec2017 Talk: Building Security Teams – Astera Schneeweisz

Sanna/ November 14, 2017/ Conference

While ‘security is not a team’, you’ll find that most companies growing just beyond 60-80 people start employing a group of people focusing primarily on the topic. But the culture of secure engineering in a company does not only strongly correlate with when you start building a security team – it becomes (and grows as) a matter of how they connect with the rest of your organization, and make security, adversarial thinking, and the care for user safety and privacy part of everyone’s concern. In this talk, Astera will review what the purposes of a security team can be, which challenges you’ll face, how you can make it scale beyond the team’s boundaries; as well as proven good practices of running (fairly operational) engineering teams themselves. Whether your organization already has a security team

Read More

DeepSec 2017 Talk: How I Rob Banks – Freakyclown

Sanna/ November 14, 2017/ Conference, High Entropy, Security

You are in for an adventure at DeepSec this year. We have a tour on robbing banks for you: A light-hearted trip through security failures both physical and electronic that have enabled me over the years to circumvent security of most of the worlds largest banks. Through the use of tales from the front line and useful illustrative slides, I will attempted to take you through the lessons to be learned from an ethical hacker with a penchant for breaking into the impossible. Let me take you on a rollercoaster ride of epic fails and grandiose plans and my Jason Bourne like adventures including Lockpicking, Kidnap, Police chases and multi-million pound bank heists. FC is a well-known ethical hacker and social engineer. He has been working in the infosec field for over 20 years

Read More

DeepSec 2017 Talk: BitCracker – BitLocker Meets GPUs – Elena Agostini

Sanna/ October 25, 2017/ Conference

Encryption and ways to break it go hand in hand. When it comes to the digital world, the method of rapidly using different keys may lead to success, provided you have sufficient computing power. The graphics processing units (GPUs) have come a long way from just preparing the bits to be sent to the display device. Nowadays GPUs are used for a lot of computational expensive tasks. At DeepSec 2017 you will hear about keys, encryption, and storage encryption – all with the use of GPUs, but forthe purpose of cracking keys. BitLocker (formerly BitLocker Drive Encryption) is a full-disk encryption feature available in recent Windows OS (Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10). It is designed to protect data by providing encryption for several types of memory units like internal hard disks or external removable

Read More

DeepSec 2017 Talk: Who Hid My Desktop – Deep Dive Into hVNC – Or Safran & Pavel Asinovsky

Sanna/ October 17, 2017/ Conference

Seeing is believing. If you sit in front of your desktop and everything looks as it should look, then you are not in the Matrix, right? Right? Well, maybe. Manipulating the surface to make something to look similar is a technique also used by phishing, spammers, and social engineers. But what if the attacker sitting on your computer does not need to see what you see? Enter hidden virtual network computing where malicious software controls your system, and you don’t know about it. Since the past decade, financial institutions are increasingly faced with the problem of malware stealing hefty amounts of money by performing fraudulent fund transfers from their customers’ online banking accounts. Many vendors attempt to solve this issue by developing sophisticated products for classifying or risk scoring each transaction. Often, identifying legitimate

Read More

DeepSec Talk 2017: Normal Permissions In Android: An Audiovisual Deception – Constantinos Patsakis

Sanna/ October 17, 2017/ Conference, Security

The Marshmallow version was a significant revision for Android. Among the new features that were introduced one of the most significant is, without any doubt, the runtime permission. The permission model was totally redesigned, categorising the permissions into four main categories. The main concept of this categorisation is how much risk a user is exposed to when permissions are granted. Therefore, normal permissions imply the least risk for the user. However, in this case, there are some important issues. Firstly, these permissions are not actually displayed to the user; they are not displayed upon installation and the user needs to dig into several menus to find them for each app. Most importantly though, these permissions cannot be revoked. Unlike permissions categorized as dangerous, where the user can grant or revoke a permission whenever deemed

Read More

DeepSec 2017 Talk: How To Hide Your Browser 0-days: Free Offense And Defense Tips Included – Zoltan Balazs

Sanna/ October 9, 2017/ Conference

There is a famous thought experiment described in the book A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. It deals with the possibility of unperceived existence; for example does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when no one is around to hear it? Given the many reports and mentions about zero-day exploits, the question might be rephrased. Does a zero-day exploit cause any effects when no one is able to detect its presence? Before we completely get lost in philosophy, the question has a real background. Zoltan Balazs wants to address the issue of zero-days in his DeepSec 2017 presentation. The idea seems somewhat contrary to intuition – protecting exploits from being disclosed. Zero-day exploits targeting browsers are usually very short-lived. These zero-days are actively gathered and analyzed by security researchers.

Read More

DeepSec 2017 Talk: BITSInject – Control Your BITS, Get SYSTEM – Dor Azouri

Sanna/ October 8, 2017/ Conference, Internet, Security

Microsoft has introduced the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) into Windows 2000 and later versions of the operating system. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 feature the version 4.0 of the protocol. BITS is designed to use idle bandwidth in order to transfer data to and from servers. BITS is an obedient servant, and it may be abused into doing transfers on behalf of others. Dor Azouri will present his findings regarding BITS at DeepSec 2007. Windows’ BITS service is a middleman for your download jobs. You start a BITS job, and from that point on, BITS is responsible for the download. But what if we tell you that BITS is a careless middleman? Current Windows software comes packaged with a mix of old and new features and components. New, shiny features and

Read More

DeepSec 2017 Talk: XFLTReaT: A New Dimension In Tunnelling – Balazs Bucsay

Sanna/ October 7, 2017/ Conference, Security

“Our new tool XFLTReaT is an open-source tunnelling framework that handles all the boring stuff and gives users the capability to take care of only the things that matter”, says Balazs. “It provides significant improvements over existing tools. From now on there is no need to write a new tunnel for each and every protocol or to deal with interfaces and routing. Any protocol can be converted to a module, which works in a plug-and-play fashion; authentication and encryption can be configured and customised on all traffic, and it is also worth mentioning that the framework was designed to be easy to configure, use and develop.” We asked Balazs Bucsay a couple more questions about his talk: Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. Tunnelling is not new at all, but

Read More