In this article, I want to provide a concise sum-up of the (to me) most interesting talks of this year’s DFRWS EU (http://www.dfrws.org/2016eu/).
Eoghan Casey, one of most famous pioneers in digital forensics, and David-Olivier Jaquet-Chiffelle, professor in police science at University of Lausanne, gave a keynote that emphasized the need for theoretical fundamental basis research in the field of digital forensics, which I fully agreed on, as this was exactly what I addressed in some of my former research.
Attila Marosi works as a Senior Threat Research at Sophos Labs in Hungary. His talk focused on vulnerable IoT devices that are exposed to the internet. His approach was to look for vulnerable devices with low cost tools and publicly available data.
He started his talk with the spoiler that he is not going to reveal any new attacks nor new techniques. But newer data are more adequate and we can see the current state of vulnerable devices connected to the internet. This means his approach was to test the state of IoT devices like Routers, NAS and so on with publicly available data.
PowerView does not use the built in AD cmdlets to be independent from the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT)-AD PowerShell Module which is only compatible with PowerShell 3.0+ and by default only installed on servers that have Active Directory services roles. PowerView, however, is compatible with PowerShell 2.0 and has no outer dependencies. Furthermore, it does not require any installation process.
The first Keynote directly after the Opening by Enno Rey was held by Ben Zevenbergen. At the beginning he pointed out that he is not a very technical guy rather he specialized in Information Law and a policy advisor to the European Parliament. Before he started to dive into his Keynote he talked about some rant story’s which happened to him while trying to make his point clear on previous conferences and that he came in peace to Troopers ;).
At the Troopers 16 Casey Smith has given a talk about the gap in Application Whitelisting.
Application Whitelisting is a technique that should prevent malware and unauthorized applications from running. Broadly speaking this is implemented by deciding if an application is trusted or not before executing it. Casey’s talk gave an understanding where this whitelisiting fails down.
In his introduction about the architecture he reminded us: There is no perfect defense. It is important to understand how the defenses work and where they fail. In the difference to exploits, which can be patched, there is no possibility to patch architecture flaws.
In their talk “Reverse Engineering a Digital Two Way Radio” Travis Goodspeed and Christiane Ruetten presented the challenges they faced and overcame while reverse engineering “Tytera MD380”, a handheld transceiver for the Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) protocol.
“Tytera MD380” is based around two chips: STM32F405 CPU with an ARM Cortex M4F core and Readout Device Protection and a HRC5000 baseband processor which implements the actual digital radio. While STM32F405 is fully documented, there is no documentation for HRC5000 publicly available but with the help of the Chinese community they were able to obtain the Chinese documentation.
At the TROOPERS’15 Jacob l. Torrey held a track about LangSec-Aware Software Development Lifecycle. He talked about programming conventions and what tools can be used for enforcing the compliance. There is a lack of metrics to understand what make software more secure or less secure. His main goals was to show that LangSec has far-reaching impacts into software security and to give the audience a framework to transform the theory into practice. A SLDC should help to find bugs sooner in the development process and reduce defect rate in production thereby. A lower defect rate in production does not only improve security it also reduces costs.
Christopher talked already about our WiFi Network during the IPv6 Security Summit and mentioned our monitoring system (we like to call “netmon”). As there were quite some people interested in the detailed setup and configuration, we would like to share the details with you. This year we used a widely known frontend called Grafana and as backend components InfluxDB and collectd. During Troopers the monitoring system was public reachable over IPv6 and provided statistics about Uplink Bandwidth, IP Protocol Distribution, Clients and Wireless Bands.
We just presented our Paper “Generic RAID Reassembly using Block-Level Entropy” at the DFRWS EU 2016 digital forensics conference (http://www.dfrws.org/). The article is about a new approach that we developed for forensic RAID recovery. Our technique calculates block-wise entropy all over the disks and uses generic heuristics on those to detect all the relevant RAID parameters such as stripe size, stripe map, disk order, and RAID type, that are needed to reassemble the RAID and make the data accessible again for forensic investigations (or just for data recovery).
Kevin Fu is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan where he directs the Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security and cofounded Virta Labs. At Troopers 16 he held a talk in the field of his research: medical device security.
He started his talk with a brief introduction how he got started with medical device security and how it has changed since he started. Round about ten years ago he started dumpster diving for medical devices to investigate how they are protected and maintained. In 2006 he held his first talk about medical device security at the FDA. In 2008 he presented a wireless replay attack against a pacemaker. In 2013 concerns about medical device security became more and more mainstream when the television series homeland featured an episode where the pacemaker of the American vice president was attacked resulting in his death. Now, instead of dumpster diving for medical devices, he works together with clinicians and has a lab for testing devices. The communication with clinicians is very important for his work, so he visits hospitals with his student so that they can learn how the process works on the inside.
