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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DeepSec 2021 Talk: Firmware Surgery: Cutting, Patching and Instrumenting Firmware for Debugging the Undebuggable – Henrik Ferdinand Nölscher

Sanna/ October 20, 2021/ Conference

Embedded systems can be challenging to analyze. Especially on automotive systems, many things that we take for granted on other software such as debugging and tracing do not always work. This is further complicated by watchdogs and peripheral processors, that go haywire when strict timing and communication requirements are violated. On some systems, debugging is even impossible because debugging resources such as pins are either used for something else or they don’t exist at all! Assuming that code can be dumped, the solution for this can be emulation, however emulating a rich automotive system can be painful and many times, only few aspects of the system can be sufficiently modeled. What if there was an in-between? How can we debug, fuzz and tamper embedded firmware without access to real-time debugging or emulation? In this

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DeepSec 2021 Talk: When Ransomware fails – Sreenidhi Ramadurgam

Sanna/ October 19, 2021/ Conference

Ransomware is a piece of code that is written by an attacker to encrypt the victim’s files. Even though it has been around for many years, its popularity has increased since the outbreak of Wannacry which shook the whole cyber world. When the logic of the ransomware code is observed we can see a common pattern here. It is similar to how humans interact with the system. I.e, to access the files, the code has to access the logical drive first. Here each logical drive is assigned a letter by the operating system. For example, when a code has to access the files in D drive, it has to access the drive ‘D’ first. What if there is a logical drive in the system which doesn’t have any letter assigned to it? Well, now

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DeepSec 2021 Talk: Large-scale Security Analysis Of IoT Firmware – Daniel Nussko

Sanna/ October 15, 2021/ Conference

Today, the number of IoT devices in both the private and corporate sectors are steadily increasing. IoT devices like IP cameras, routers, printers, and IP phones have become ubiquitous in our modern homes and enterprises. To evaluate the security of these devices, a security analysis has to be performed for every single device. Since manual analysis of a device and reverse engineering of a firmware image is very time-consuming, this is not practicable for large-scale analysis. To be able to conduct a large-scale study on the security of embedded network devices, an approach was applied that allows a high number of firmware images to be statically analyzed. For data acquisition, a crawler was used to identify and retrieve publicly available firmware images from the Internet. In this way, more than 10,000 individual firmware images

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