At Troopers18 there will be a new special track on
Microsoft Active Directory and its security aspects, similar to the SAP security
track which we established some years ago. The AD security track will feature,
amongst others, the following talks.
Sean Metcalf: Active Directory Security. The Journey
Abstract: This talk is a journey into the challenges most organizations
encounter while trying to secure their ‘castle’. The attacker has to be right
only once, right? Not exactly. We will walk through effective security
strategies that will stymie and frustrate attackers and better protect the
Active Directory environment.
I am amazed by how this years BlackHoodie
unraveled. Three days that included a pre-conference of lightening talks and two
parallel tracks with a total of 64 enthusiastic members. The very spirit of
BlackHoodie is nothing other than the quest to
gain deep knowledge. Reverse engineering is one of the hardest fields in
security. It touches on all fields of computing, starting from assembly,
programming, file formats, operating systems, networks and what not. This makes
it hard but an extremely fulfilling experience to spend time learning it. For
me, the very idea of staring at a binary till you understand what it does is a
magical feeling.
Following my work with the
FreeBSD implementation of RFC 6980
I was happy to present my work at last week’s DENOG 9 meeting.
To make it available to anyone who did not meet me there and go into some more
detail that would have exceeded the boundaries of the talk, I will cover the
topic here.
After the preceding work on
Windows Server 2016
and the FreeBSD testing, as a Linux user, lover and administrator, I of course
wanted to take a look at how different Linux systems complied with the RFC 6980
standard.
TROOPERS17 was unlike any TROOPERS we had
known before. Everything just seemed bolder, better, and beyond our
expectations. From surprise speakers like
the grugq (do you have a follow-up talk for
#TR18 by the way?) to new speakers who are now TROOPERS family, TROOPERS17 is
one for the history books!
If you were there you might be wondering to yourself, how could they possibly
top it (and if you were not there check out this
video from TR17)? Well, I am not
going to lie, it will be a challenge. However, the high quality of talk and
training submissions for this year have us feeling pretty positive about making
#TR18 the “best year ever”!
Looking at IPv6 deployment graphs like
this one it
becomes clear that IPv6 still is not widely deployed in enterprise space (the
reason for the apparent oscillation in that curve is the difference between
working days – where people use their office computers – and weekend where they
preferably use their smartphones or their home equipment connected by means of
broadband networks).
There’s a number of good reasons for this (in a nutshell: the overall IPv6
architecture is oriented around, and benefits, the decoupling of mostly
autonomous, self-organized endpoints from a well-managed/provider-managed
network infrastructure which isn’t exactly the operations model many large
enterprise organizations have in mind for their networks. also you might have a
look at
these slides
from RIPE74 to understand some of the reluctance to deploy IPv6 in certain
companies).
The conference was very well organized and attendee focused, which could be seen
by the many little details found on the conference. For example you never ran
out of coffee or beverages, there was a new Hallway Track where you could meet
people from all disciplines, discuss about your favorite topics and there was
always a place to sit and take a break between all those interesting
presentations. I had the chance to speak to very nice people from different
industries, most importantly in my case on the topic security. It was nice to
see how the Docker community is growing and the adoption rate is increasing,
especially in companies. The main focus of the conference (especially seen in
talks held by people from Docker Inc.) was the Docker Enterprise Edition.
the
last post was
about a fuse filesystem which provides a read-only access to the proprietary
bluecoat filesystem. After some further investigations based on the
possibilities this offered us, I started to implement a tool which allows to
modify parts of the filesystem.
Protection Mechanisms
Since last time, the discovered filesystem structures still had unknown fields.
Some of those fields could be reconstructed and their purpose in the whole
construct. The format of the Partition-Header for example could now be
described as
Some time ago, one of our customers contacted us with a special request. For
some legitimate reason, they needed to centrally collect certain certificates
including their private keys which were distributed across many client systems
running Windows and stored in the corresponding user stores. Unfortunately (only
in this case, but actually good from a security perspective), the particular
private keys were marked non-exportable making a native export in the context of
the user impossible. As if this wasn’t enough, the extraction was supposed to be
executed in the context of the current user (i.e. without administrative
privileges) while not triggering the existing Anti Virus solution at all. Also,
the certificates needed to be transferred to some trusted system where they
could not be accessed in an unauthorized way. So let’s have a look how we
tackled these problems:
We are super excited for TROOPERS18 (March
12-16th, 2018) as are many of you! We even have this great saying that “after
TROOPERS is before TROOPERS”, which means we spend a lot of time looking
through feedback from attendees, speakers/trainers, and our own Crew for ways to
not only top what we’ve done in the years before, but also how to simply make it
better for everyone involved. Looking around at our Crew we realized how
many have either attended TROOPERS or other conferences as students. We heard
from them, as well as other students, how life changing it was to be able, as a
student, to attend an IT-Security conference. How they got to meet a speaker
whose work they’d read about in class. How people felt even more a part of the
community they were studying hard to belong to.
A while ago I wrote a short paper laying out options for an enterprise
organization to get global IPv6 address space from the RIPE NCC, discussing the
advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. As I think the topic may
be of interest for others, too, I’ve distilled an anonymized version. It can be
found here. I hope
some of you find it useful.