DeepSec 2022 Talk: Identification of the Location in the 5G Network – Giorgi Akhalaia

Sanna/ September 6, 2022/ Conference

Mobile devices can provide the majority of everyday services: like emergency, healthcare, security services. The development of mobile devices itself triggered the 5G network deployment. The new telecom standard will create a new ecosystem with a variety of industries and will exceed the limit of telecom communication. With new standards, functionality, services, products always arise new cyber threats. The operating spectrum in the 5G Network is divided into 3 categories: Low, Middle and High Bands. Actually, the third category, high band, also known as mmWave provides majority benefits of the new standard. This band covers from 6 GHz to 100 GHz operating spectrums. Because of the limitation of this frequency range, devices connected to high-band have to be near to the cell-tower. Otherwise, buildings will interrupt the connection. So, when a user is connected

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DeepSec 2022 Talk: Machine Learning Use in OSINT – Giorgi Iashvili

Sanna/ September 5, 2022/ Conference

Open source intelligence is one of the important aspects of cyber security activities as it relies on the publicly available sources, such as social networks, websites, blogs, etc. This includes data mining and gathering techniques, as well as data extraction and data analysis activities. Open source intelligence is widely used in different fields today. Mainly, this process runs manually and is fully managed by humans. Moving from a manual to automated processes in OSINT is vital, especially that we work with real-world operations. Different components must build a relevant system to provide automated open source-based activities together with training simulations for the Machine Learning. The structure of the ML approach is the following: Requirements: Information used from previous user experience; Collection: Web crawlers or / and scrapers; Processing exploration: Pattern recognition, Detection of the

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DeepSec 2022 Talk: Auditing Closed Source Trusted Applications for Qualcomm Secure Execution Environment (QSEE)- Hector Marco & Fernando Vano

Sanna/ August 31, 2022/ Conference

Smartphones have become essential devices for carrying out many daily activities, including security-sensitive tasks such as authentication and payments. The security of sensitive data in modern mobile devices relies on hardware-enabled Trusted Execution Environments, amongst which ARM TrustZone is one of the most widely used. Qualcomm Secure Execution Environment (QSEE) is one of the most widespread commercial TEE solutions in the smartphone space, used by many devices such as Xiaomi, Motorola and several devices of the Google Nexus and Pixel series. In order to audit the QSEE environment, security researchers have to face distinct challenges. On the one hand, the software components of QSEE (i.e., trusted operating system and trusted applications) are not open sourced and can be quite complex, which requires a considerable extent of reverse engineering efforts to conduct analysis and to

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DeepSec 2022 Talk: End-to-end Health Data Privacy Using Secure 5G Data Channels – Dr. Razvan Bocu

Sanna/ August 30, 2022/ Conference

The integrated collection of personal health data represents a relevant research topic, which is enhanced further by the development of next generation mobile networks that can be used in order to transport the gained medical data. The gathering of personal health data has become recently workable using relevant wearable personal devices. Nevertheless, these devices do not possess sufficient computational power, and do not offer proper local data storage capabilities. This paper presents an integrated personal health metrics data management system, which considers a virtualized symmetric 5G data transportation system. The personal health data is gained using a client application component, which is normally deployed on the user’s mobile device, regardless if it is a smartphone, smartwatch, or another kind of personal mobile device. The collected data is securely transported to the cloud data processing

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DeepSec 2022 Talk: Faking at Level 1 – How Digital Twins Save Your PLCs – Thomas Weber

Sanna/ August 29, 2022/ Conference

Every year, many big and small incidents in industrial environments, like power plants, factories, or food supply, find their way into newspapers. All those affected industries are backed by highly branched and historically grown Operational Technology (OT) networks. A sizeable portion of such incidents would have been avoidable, if network segmentation was done correctly and patches for user devices (not always possible in OT) were installed.Despite such known problems, that also lead to the compromise of traditional IT networks, a bunch of unknown vulnerabilities are unfortunately also present in OT infrastructure. OT in modern factories contains of networked (and smart) devices, especially on level 1, also called the control level, of the Purdue model. Devices, like PLCs, industrial router/switches, data diodes, and more, cannot be easily tested if they are in use by the

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DeepSec 2022 Talk: Post-quantum Verkle Signature Scheme – Maksim Iavich

Sanna/ August 26, 2022/ Conference

We expect mass production of quantum computers in the near future. Quantum computers can easily break cryptographic schemes that are used in practice. Thus, classical encryption systems become vulnerable to attacks using quantum computers. There are research efforts to find encryption schemes that are resistant to attacks using quantum computers. Digital signatures are an important technology in securing the Internet and other IT infrastructures. A digital signature provides the authenticity, integrity, and identification of data. We use digital signatures in identification and authentication protocols. So, these secure digital signature algorithms are crucial in terms of IT security. Today, in practice, digital signature algorithms such as RSA, DSA, ECDSA are used. However, they are not quantum stable, as their safety relies on large composite integers, complex factorization and the computation of discrete logarithms. We asked

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DeepSec 2022 Talk: GitHub Actions Security Landscape – Ronen Slavin

Sanna/ August 25, 2022/ Conference

GitHub Actions, the recent (from 2018) CI/CD addition to the popular source control system, is becoming an increasingly popular DevOps tool mainly due to its rich marketplace and simple integration. As part of our research of the GitHub Actions security landscape, we discovered that in writing a perfectly secure GitHub Actions workflow, several pitfalls could cause severe security consequences. For example, many developers would use event input data to improve their workflow process. However, this data could be controlled by an attacker, and potentially compromise the build process. Unless the developers are proficient in the depths of GitHub best-practices documents, these workflows would have mistakes. Such mistakes are costly – and could cause a potential supply chain risk to the product. During the talk, we’ll walk you through our journey on how we found

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DeepSec 2022 Talk: Towards the Automation of Highly Targeted Phishing Attacks with Adversarial Artificial Intelligence – Francesco Morano and Enrico Frumento

Sanna/ August 24, 2022/ Conference

The work we will present aims to develop a Proof of Concept (PoC) of an attack scenario that uses Artificial Intelligence (i.e., AI) to create a semi-automatic phishing attack. The AI-based PoC used different network types to automatically compose highly targeted phishing emails with information derived from the initial OSINT analysis of the potential victims. The study approaches the problem from a cybercriminal point of view to understand the feasibility of such an attack tactic and prepare for possible defences. Phishing is a popular way to perform social engineering attacks. According to the Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, 82% of data breaches involve human elements and belong to several categories, including phishing, the most common. Using AI tools, this study implements a complete attack chain: (i) initial collection of victims’ data through OSINT,

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DeepSec 2022 Talk: Hey You! Get Off my Satellite! – Paul Coggin

Sanna/ August 23, 2022/ Conference

There are many components and systems that may be targeted in a space system by adversaries including ground station systems and satellites. In this presentation we will discuss ideas for providing cyber resiliency in zero-gravity. Both theoretical and real-world examples of cybersecurity issues concerning satellite systems will be covered. This presentation will step through attack trees for targeting satellite systems. Recommendations best practices for securing satellite systems will be discussed. In addition, new ideas industry is currently developing for improving the cyber resiliency of space systems will be presented. We asked Paul a few more questions about his talk. Please tell us the top 5 facts about your talk. Examples of real-world satellite hacking events will be covered. Recommended best practices for securing ground systems, and spacecraft will be discussed. Space ground systems are

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DeepSec2021 Talk: QKD-based Security for 5G and Next Generation Networks – Sergiy Gnatyuk, PhD. DSc.

Sanna/ November 16, 2021/ Conference, Security

Modern information and communication technologies (ICT) implementation in all spheres of human activity, as well as the increasing number and power of cyber-attacks on them make the cyber security of the developed digital state vulnerable and weak. Cyber-attacks become targeted (so-called APT-attacks) and attackers carefully prepare them, analyzing the identified vulnerabilities and all possible ways of attack. The security and defense capabilities of the state are considered in an additional fifth domain titled cyberspace (after land, air, water and space). World`s leading states develop strategies to protect cyberspace, create cyber troops, develop and test cyber weapons. A significant number of cyber-attacks today are aimed at critical infrastructures and government organizations. Traditional security methods (in particular, cryptographic algorithms) do not fully protect against all currently known attacks, they are potentially vulnerable to attacks based on

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DeepSec 2021 Talk: Running an AppSec Program in an Agile Environment – Mert Coskuner

Sanna/ October 29, 2021/ Conference

Application security in an enterprise is a challenge. We can see this when we look at the statistics: There have been 16648 security vulnerabilities (CVEs) published so far in 2020 and the average severity is 7.1 out of 10. In this talk, you will find various solutions such as – Development team risk scoring based on maturity and business aspect, – SAST/DAST at CI/CD pipeline without blocking the pipeline itself, – How to leverage bug bounty program, – When to employ penetration testing, – When to employ code review, – Platform developments to remove dependency for developers to implement features, i.e. internal authorization. Most important of all, you will see these solutions lead to minimal friction within the team, which creates a fine-tuned security program. We asked Mert a few more questions about his

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DeepSec2021 Talk: On Breaking Virtual Shareholder Meetings: How Secure is Corporate Germany? – Andreas Mayer

Sanna/ October 29, 2021/ Conference

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a major impact on annual general meetings (AGMs) of shareholders worldwide. Due to existing gathering restrictions the vast majority of AGMs shifted from physical to online voting events. Therefore, purely virtual AGMs emerged to the new normal where shareholders approve critical company decisions. But how secure are those virtual events really? In this talk, I will present a systematic large-scale study on the security of 623 virtual AGMs held by German companies in 2020 including corporations listed in stock indices such as DAX and MDAX. In 72% of all virtual AGMs analyzed, at least one of the three CIA triad security goals was compromised. Join my talk and I will take you on an enthralling journey through the nitty gritty details and pitfalls that lead to the severe vulnerabilities

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DeepSec 2021 Talk: Building a Cybersecurity Workforce: Challenges for Organizations – Matthieu J. Guitton

Sanna/ October 23, 2021/ Conference

The shift of human activities from offline to online spaces has major impacts on organizations – either public or corporate – in terms of security, therefore creating a constantly growing need for cybersecurity experts. Although for small companies, expertise can come from external providers, large organizations need to build their own cybersecurity workforce. The limited number of higher education formations result for companies in tension in the employment market, and in the recruitment of people whose expertise is not primarily on cybersecurity. Furthermore, cybersecurity often focuses on technical aspects, and does not always deal enough with the human factor – while the human factor is critical for companies and other large organizations. This presentation will explore the challenges related to building a workforce in cybersecurity from the point of view of organizations. We will

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DeepSec 2021 Talk: SSH spoofing attack on FIDO2 Devices in Combination with Agent Forwarding – Manfred Kaiser

Sanna/ October 22, 2021/ Conference

Since OpenSSH 8.2 there is the possibility to secure a private key with a with a FIDO2 token (Nitrokey, Yubikey, …). A key protected by FIDO2 must be manually confirmed each time the key is used and prevents misuse of the key if an SSH agent is compromised. Although it is known that agent forwarding is a security risk and should not be used, support has been extended with OpenSSH 8.5 (Released: 3.3.2021). Prior to OpenSSH 8.5, it was not possible to forward an SSH agent during file transfers (SCP/SFTP) to another server. This was one of the reasons why AUT-milCERT (BMLV) took a closer look at the SSH protocol. The goal was to find out whether a FIDO2 protected key can provide sufficient protection against misuse in case of a leaked agent. During

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DeepSec 2021 Talk: Releasing The Cracken – A Data Driven Approach for Password Generation – Or Safran & Shmuel Amar

Sanna/ October 21, 2021/ Conference

By now, it should be well known that passwords are like underwear, they should be changed often, the longer the better and it’s better not to leave them lying around. While the big players advocating for passwordless authentication, passwords are still the most common authentication method. In the wild, we’ve seen thousands of organizations experiencing password spraying and bruteforce attacks on their users. Although MFA should mitigate some of the threats, it’s still not implemented on all protocols and in some cases was bypassed by security flaws in the IDP. In this talk, we’ll present a new concept for password security – smartlists, built on a new data driven approach that utilizes recent advancements in NLP. Together with this talk, we are proud to release a new FOSS tool that makes these new concepts

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