Events

Troopers 2012 – Final round of talks selected

It’s done. The exciting (and demanding) process of selecting talks for Troopers is complete (for the record: second round of talk selection was here, the first here).

We’re quite happy and looking forward to the event 😉

 

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Rodrigo Branco: Into the Darkness – Dissecting Targeted Attacks

The current threat landscape around cyber attacks is complex and hard to understand even for IT pros. The media coverage on recent events increases the challenge by putting fundamentally different attacks into the same category, often labeled as advanced persistent threats (APTs). The resulting mix of attacks includes everything from broadly used, exploit-kit driven campaigns driven by cyber criminals, to targeted attacks that use 0-day vulnerabilities and are hard to fend off – blurring the threat landscape, causing confusion where clarity is most needed.

This presentation analyzes a specific incident, last March’s RSA breach, explaining the techniques used by the attackers and detailing the vulnerability used to gain access to the network. It further explores the possible mitigation techniques available in current software on the OS and application level to prevent such attacks from reoccurring.

Bio: Rodrigo Rubira Branco (BSDaemon) is the Director of Vulnerability & Malware Research at Qualys. In 2011 he was honored as one of the top contributors to Adobe Vulnerabilities in the past 12 months. Previously, as the Chief Security Research at Check Point he founded the Vulnerability Discovery Team (VDT) and released dozens of vulnerabilities in many important software. He is a member of the RISE Security Group and is the organizer of Hackers to Hackers Conference (H2HC), the oldest and biggest security research conference in Latin America.

 

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Carsten Amann: Security can not only Be Managed by Numbers – You Need More

Abstract: From “the management’s perspective” IT security is usually reduced to key performance indicators. Those indicators tend to leave some room for interpretation, especially for top management people. This room for interpretation can lead to decisions which do not only not improve the security level, but might actually decrease it.

The presentation will give an overview how IT security should be “managed by numbers”, to provide transparency and to gain the trust of the top management.

Bio: After his business information systems studies Carsten Amann started his career with a very large consulting company. He was assigned in managerial positions to software implementation projects for different clients. In 2007 he continued his career with a global supplier for technology and services. There he was initially responsible for the global IT security operations (virus protection, encryption, anti-spam etc.). After this assignment he took over the responsibility for the IT-Client topic (operating system, software distribution). Then he took over the responsibility for services within a product area.

 

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Manuel Leithner: Cloud Storage and Its Implications on Security and Privacy

Abstract: With everything moving to the cloud nowadays, security and privacy is often left behind. An ever increasing number of cloud storage operators offer low cost online storage. In this talk we will present our results on the popular service Dropbox, which relied heavily on data deduplication for better user experience. While data deduplication is a straight forward way to decrease costs in terms of bandwidth and storage, it has implications on privacy and security of user data if done wrong – there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. We will furthermore present methods how data deduplication can work correctly.

Bio: Manuel was introduced to information security while graduating from a technical college and has done research in the areas of mobile security, cloud computing and compile-time obfuscation. He has appeared on national television, podcasts and possibly Chinese security blacklists.

Furthermore, he’s known to use presentations with an average of 0.3 words per slide.

 

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Piotr Cofta: Security professionals  – plumbers of trust

Abstract: Trust is a foundation of security, so that it is often overlooked. The presentation analyses trust from the perspective of an information security professional. It discusses what trust is, how it is structured and what can be done about it, beyond the familiarity of trust assessment or trust management. As a result, participants will develop professional insight into trust.

Bio: Dr. Piotr Cofta is managing Security Transformation, having moved from his role as a Chief Researcher, Identity and Trust. Before that, he has been working for many years for Nokia and for Media Lab Europe, concentrating on the relationship between trust, risk, technology and society.

Dr. Cofta is a contributor to several international standards; he publishes and speaks frequently. He is an author of several patents and publications, from areas such as trust management, identity and privacy, digital rights management and electronic commerce. He is a CISSP and a senior member of IEEE. You can contact him at Piotr.Cofta@cofta.net or at http://piotr.cofta.net.

 

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Frank Block & Michael Thumann: Some Notes on Web Application Firewalls or Why You still Get Owned

Abstract: This talk illuminates Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), with particular focus on the negative detection model. It will present methods how they can be fingerprinted and circumvented in order to demonstrate the wrong feeling of security they might create. Furthermore the tool tsakwaf (The Swiss Army Knife for Web Application Firewalls) will be covered, a little script written in perl that includes various code generation functions for circumventing WAFs and a fingerprinting routine to identify supported WAFs.

Of course there will be some nice demos to prove the point and the speakers will also share their experience from daily web application pentest tasks. Finally, as a special gift, an enhanced version of TSAKWAF will be released at Troopers.

Bios: Frank Block is a security consultant working for ERNW GmbH and penetration tester focusing on web application pentests. One of his passions is the analysis of security mechanisms to find ways to circumvent those.

Michael Thumann is the Chief Security Officer and the head of the ERNW’s application security team. He has published security advisories regarding topics like ‘Cracking IKE Preshared Keys’ and buffer overflows in web servers or VPN software. Michael enjoys sharing his self-written security tools (e.g. ‘tomas – a Cisco Password Cracker’, ‘ikeprobe – IKE PSK Vulnerability Scanner’ or ‘dnsdigger – a dns information gathering tool’) and his experience with the community. Besides numerous articles and papers he wrote the first German book on pentesting that has become a recommended reading at German universities.

In addition to his daily pentesting tasks he is a regular conference-speaker (incl. several Black Hat events, HITB and RSA Conference) and has also contributed exploit code to the Metasploit Framework. With more than 10 years of experience in computer security Michaels’ main interest is to uncover vulnerabilities and security design flaws from the network to the application level and to reverse almost everything to understand the inner workings.

 

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Johnny Deutsch: The Social Map

Abstract: In our talk we will discuss about the threats that social networks pose on organizations. We will display case studies from our clients that have encountered unwanted exposure on account of their employees or social network applications. The talk addresses issues, such as using the social network as a bed for corporate intelligence gathering, how do users interact with their co-workers and how can we infer from usage trends on the corporate social network policy.

We will demonstrate a variety of issues that corporations must think of when deciding to go on to the social networks. One of the most relevant usages on these networks is to harvest personal data and perform some data visualization tools, such as “Touch Graph”. This application performs this by mapping your friends, dissecting them into groups and creating a map of the employee’s social connections. The map is a good indicator of “closed groups”, a reference that indicated from where these people connect\relate to the employee. A tool that we manufactured for our cyber-services department can achieve a unique feature that enables intelligence gathering on people that user is directly related to or has social ties with. This tool creates a visualization of social circles that are not directly related to your profile, by gathering information that is open for the pubic on Facebook and displays it as a map of connections. In our talk we will display usage cases of the tool and how it relates to our social policy methodology.

Bio: Johnny Deutsch is a manager in the Advisory Services practice of Ernst & Young LLP. Johnny leads the cyber warfare and crime section at Ernst & Young?s Hacktics Advanced Security Center (HASC) based in Tel Aviv, Israel. This cutting-edge security team is dedicated to conducting attack and penetration assessments for EY clients. In this role Johnny is in charge of developing new methodologies and performs cyber vulnerability assessments for HASC clients. Johnny has over 10 years of experience in the field of IT systems and security specializing in large scale VoIP systems and data networking. Prior to Johnny`s employment at HASC, he was a consultant at the Israeli Ministry of Defense and managed large scale projects in the field of IRM (Information Rights Management) and NAC (Network Access Control) systems. Prior to the MoD, Johnny was employed by an American sub contractor for the American Department of Defense and managed projects in the field of cellular communication and its integration of VoIP based PBXs. Prior to the DoD, Johnny served in the Israeli Defense Force and managed integration projects in the field of enterprise storage systems (Netapp) and enterprise WAN communications. Johnny is an active reserve duty officer in the Israeli army at the rank of Lieutenant.

 

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See you @Troopers, take care

Enno

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Events

Troopers 2012 – Second Round of Talks Selected

Hi everybody,

after having announced the first round of Troopers speakers here, we’re happy to publish the second round today 😉

Here we go:

 

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Dmitry Sklyarov – “Secure Password Managers” and “Military-Grade Encryption” on Smartphones: Oh Really?

Abstract:  The task of providing privacy and data confidentiality with mobile applications becomes more and more important as the adoption of smartphones and tablets grows. As a result, there are a number of vendors and applications providing solutions to address those needs, such as password managers and file encryption utilities for mobile devices.

In this talk we will analyze several password managers and file encryption applications for Apple iOS platform and demonstrate that they often do not provide any reasonable level of security and that syncing data between desktop and mobile versions of the applications increases the risk of compromise. We will also show that the best way to provide privacy and confidentiality on Apple iOS platform is by adhering to Apple Developer Guidelines and not by reinventing the wheel.

Bio: Dmitry is a Security Researcher at Elcomsoft and a lecturer at Moscow State Technical University. He did a research on the security of eBooks and on the authentication of digital photos. Recent research projects involved mobile phone and smartphone forensics. Dmitry is also a co-developer of the Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit.

 

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Thomas Stocker: Business Application Security in a Global Enterprise

Abstract: In this talk the business application security process at Allianz SE will be laid out. Information security is an integral part of any IT related project from the very beginning and – supported by a well-defined framework of processes and accompanying documents – this is maintained through the whole project lifecycle. I will give a detailed overview of the process, show the relevant steps and documents and discuss common challenges when dealing with the projects, how to tackle those and lessons learned.

Bio: Thomas works as Information Security Officer for the Holding of Allianz SE. He has initially established and continuously improved the business application security process since he took over the job six years ago. Prior to that he worked as an application developer and architect, so he knows his stuff from the ground up.

 
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Meredith Patterson & Sergey Bratus: Theory of Insecurity

Abstract: Why is the overwhelming majority of networked software still not secure, despite all effort to the contrary? Why is it almost certain to get exploited so long as attackers can craft its inputs?  Why is it the case that no amount of effort seems enough to fix software that must speak certain protocols?

The answer to these questions is that for many protocols and services currently in use on the Internet, the problem of recognizing and validating their “good”, expected inputs from bad ones is either not well-posed or is undecidable (i.e., no algorithm can exist to solve it in the general case), which means that their implementations cannot even be comprehensively tested, let alone automatically checked for weaknesses or correctness. The designers’ desire for more functionality has made these protocols effectively unsecurable.

In this talk we’ll draw a direct connection between this ubiquitous insecurity and basic computer science concepts of Turing completeness and theory of languages. We will show how well-meant protocol designs are doomed to their implementations becoming clusters of 0day, and will show where to look for these 0day. We will also discuss simple principles of how to avoid designing such protocols.

Bios: Meredith L. Patterson is a software engineer at Red Lambda. She developed the first language-theoretic defense against SQL injection in 2005 as a PhD student at the University of Iowa, and has continued expanding the technique ever since. She lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Sergey Bratus is a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. He sees state-of-the-art hacking as a distinct research and engineering discipline that, although not yet recognized as such, harbors deep insights into the nature of computing. He has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Northeastern University and worked at BBN Technologies on natural language processing research before coming to Dartmouth.

 

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Mariano Nunez Di Croce: SAP (In)security: Latest Attacks and Defenses

Abstract: This presentation details some of the latest attack vectors against SAP systems, explaining some of the techniques malicious parties may use to compromise the systems remotely and then escalate privileges to access sensitive business information.

Join us to see live demonstrations of these attacks, learn about the statistics of dozens of real-world SAP Penetration Tests and identify which are the latest advances in preventing your SAP systems from falling in the wrong hands.

Bio: Mariano Nunez Di Croce is the CEO at Onapsis. Mariano is a renowned researcher in the ERP & SAP Security field, being the first to present on real-world security attacks to SAP platforms. Since then, he has been invited to lecture in some of the most important security conferences in the world, such as BlackHat DC/USA/EU, RSA, SAP, HITB Dubai/EU, Troopers, Ekoparty, HackerHalted, DeepSec, Sec-T, Hack.lu and Seacure.it, as well as in Fortune-100 companies and military organizations.

Mariano has discovered 50+ vulnerabilities in SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM applications. He leads the strategic development of Onapsis X1, has been the developer of the first open-source SAP & ERP Penetration Testing Frameworks and leads the “SAP Security In-Depth” publication. Mariano is also a founding member of BIZEC.org, the Business Security Community. Because of his research work, he has been interviewed and featured in mainstream media such as CNN, Reuters, IDG, New York Times, eWeek, PCWorld, Darkreading and others.

 

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Mario Heiderich: Got your Nose! How to steal your precious data without using scripts

Abstract: Cross Site Scripting techniques and quirky JavaScript have received a lot of attention — thus more and more ways to get hands on this threat are being developed and practiced: Security aware people simply switch JavaScript off, developers use sand-boxed IFrames and CSP to protect their applications and NoScript, XSS filters and HTMLPurifer do a great job in keeping people from getting “XSS’d”. But what about attacks in the browser that don’t require any scripting at all — but still steal your precious data, right before you know it? What about attacks so sneaky and sophisticated or just simple, even your best Anti-XSS solution won’t prevent them? Attacks, that don’t use any scripting — but fierce markup tricks from outer space? This talk will introduce and discuss those kinds of attacks, show how attackers steal plain-text passwords, read CSRF tokens and other sensitive data and create self-spying emails and worse without executing a single line of JavaScript. Deactivating scripts and eliminating XSS as a good level of protection? Not anymore!

Bio: Mario Heiderich works as a researcher for the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany, focuses on HTML5, SVG security and believes XSS can be eradicated by using JavaScript. Maybe. Some day. Mario invoked the HTML5 security cheat-sheet and maintains the PHPIDS filter rules. In his spare time he delivers trainings and security consultancy for larger German and international companies for sweet sweet money and the simple minded fun in breaking things. Mario has spoken on a large variety of international conferences, co-authored two books, several academic papers and doesn’t see a problem in his some weeks old son having a netbook already. There you have it.

 

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Nikhil Mittal:  More fun using Kautilya or Is it a thumb drive? Is it a toy? no it’s a keyboard

Abstract:  How many non-traditional methods you use to get into systems? How about having some more fun while getting into the systems and also making profit out of it? Let us increase the awesomeness of our Penetration tests and start using Human Interface Devices such as Teensy in the pwnage trade.

The tool for the trade for this talk will be Kautilya. Kautilya is a toolkit which can be used to perform various pre-exploitation and post-exploitation activities. Kautilya aims on easing the use of attack vectors which traditionally require human intervention but can be automated using Teensy. Kautilya contains some nice customizable payloads which may be used for enumeration, info gathering, disabling countermeasures, keylogging and using Operating System against itself for much more. The talk will be full of live demonstrations.

An updated version of Kautilya will be released at Troopers that includes a number of previously unseen Linux payloads.

Bio: Nikhil Mittal is a hacker, info sec researcher and enthusiast. His area of interest includes penetration testing, attack research, defense strategies and post exploitation research. He has over 3 years experience in Penetration Testing of many Government Organizations of India and other global corporate giants at his current job position.

He specializes in assessing security risks at secure environments which require novel attack vectors and “out of the box” approach. . He is creator of Kautilya, a toolkit to utilize teensy in penetration tests. In his free time, Nikhil likes to scan full IP ranges of countries for specific vulnerabilities, writes some silly Metasploit scripts and does some vulnerability research. He has spoken at Clubhack’10, Hackfest’11, Clubhack’11 and Black Hat Abu Dhabi’11.

 

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More talks to follow next week, so stay tuned 😉

See you @Troopers, take care

 

Enno

 

 

 

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Events

Troopers 2012 – First round of talks selected

We’re delighted to provide the first announcement of talks of next year’s Troopers edition. Looks like it’s going to be a great event again  😉

Here we go:

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Andreas Wiegenstein: Real SAP Backdoors

Abstract: In the past year the number of lecture sessions with traumatizing headlines about hacking SAP systems has dramatically risen. Their content, however, is usually the same. Insecure implementations of algorithms, side effects in commands, flawed business logic and designs that brilliantly miss the point of security. In essence, security defects built into the SAP framework by mistake.

This session, however, demonstrates several security defects in SAP NetWeaver that do not appear to have been created by mistake. In order to make a point, I will first discuss with the audience what exactly defines a backdoor. Then I will demonstrate several zero day security defects discovered by me & my team and finally discuss with the audience if these defects qualify as backdoors. All security defects shown are highly critical and have never been publically discussed before. They enable attackers to remotely execute arbitrary ABAP commands and arbitrary OS commands. In essence, full control over SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP.

Bio: Andreas Wiegenstein has been working as a professional SAP security consultant for 9 years. He performed countless SAP code audits and has been researching security defects specific to SAP / ABAP applications. He leads the CodeProfiler Research Labs at Virtual Forge, a team focusing on SAP/ABAP specific vulnerabilities and countermeasures. At the CodeProfiler Labs, he works on ABAP security guidelines, ABAP security trainings, an ABAP security scanner as well as white papers and publications.

Andreas has trained large companies and defense organizations on ABAP security and has spoken at SAP TechEd on several occasions as well as at security conferences such as BlackHat, HITB, Troopers and RSA. He is co-author of the first  book on ABAP security (SAP Press 2009). He is also a founding member of BIZEC.org, the Business Security community.

 

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Mike Ossmann: Welcome to Bluetooth Smart

Abstract: Bluetooth Smart, formerly known as Bluetooth Low Energy, is an entirely new wireless protocol that is not backward compatible with “classic” Bluetooth.  With consumer devices emerging in early 2012, this is the perfect time to review Bluetooth Smart and how it works.  Packet captures from actual devices will be dissected, and particular attention will be given to the new security procedures specified for Bluetooth Smart. Depending on what devices are commercially available by the time of the conference, I may or may not have a live demo prepared with actual consumer devices.  At the very least, I will be able to do a demo using development boards as targets.

Bio: Michael Ossmann is a wireless security researcher who makes hardware for hackers.  He founded Great Scott Gadgets in an effort to put exciting, new tools into the hands of innovative people.

Previous work includes:

ShmooCon 2011: Project Ubertooth: Building a Better Bluetooth Adapter

ToorCon 2010: Real Men Carry Pink Pagers (with Travis Goodspeed)

ShmooCon 2010: Bluetooth Keyboards: Who Owns Your Keystrokes?

ShmooCon 2009: Building an All-Channel Bluetooth Monitor (with Dominic  Spill)

Black Hat USA 2008: Software Radio and the Future of Wireless Security

 

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Daniel Mende & Enno Rey: Protecting Voice-over-IP in 2012

Abstract: We’ve recently conducted a number of pentests in (mostly large) VoIP environments. While the fraction of “traditional VoIP attacks” (re-direct/sniff VoIP traffic, reconstruct VoIP calls) has decreased over time, we’ve been able to severely compromise pretty much every environment due to implementation flaws on the infrastructure or “supporting systems” level. Based on a number of warstories, in this talk we will lay out what went wrong in the respective cases and how to protect from the (types of) attacks we performed. Some demos will add spice to the talk. Furthermore a number of previously undisclosed severe vulnerabilities in the crypto architecture of a major vendor’s VoIP solution will be presented.

Bios: Daniel and Enno are long time network geeks who love to explore network devices & protocols and to break flawed ones.

 

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Graeme Neilson: DISCQO: “Discourse on Implications for Security and Cryptography from Quantum Oddness”

Abstract: Quantum computing is a fascinating, emerging technology with a potentially huge impact on security. This talk introduces the principles of quantum computing and the current state of the art. This is followed by a discussion on the uses of quantum based computer systems within security, the potential implications for cryptography, now and in the future, and the possibility of hacking current quantum based cryptography systems.

What is quantum computing?

What is quantum key exchange?

Can quantum key exchange be hacked?

Will a quantum computer be able to decrypt all my encrypted data?

Do I need a quantum computer?

Do quantum computers even exist?

What are the implications of quantum computing on my current cryptography?

 

Bio: Graeme Neilson is NOT a quantum physicist or any other kind of physicist…not in this universe anyway…

Still, he does think it’s probable that he can help illuminate the subject of quantum computing for other non-physicists in IT. With over 14 years of experience in IT security Graeme currently works as a security researcher / consultant for Aura Information Security with specialisations in cryptography, reverse engineering and networking. Based out of New Zealand he is a regular speaker at international conferences including Blackhat, H2HC, CanSecWest, DayCon and Troopers.

 

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Pete Herzog: Securing Robot Mosquitoes with Laser Beams for Eyes in the Enterprise

Abstract: One day employees start bringing robot mosquitoes into the office. They have robot mosquitoes at home and just they’re so damn useful for checking mail, making appointments, singing naptime songs, and spying over the neighbor’s fence. So why wouldn’t they? Your security policy doesn’t expressly forbid robot mosquitoes with laser beams for eyes or anything like it so here they are: riding the internal WiFi, carrying who knows what diseases and parasites from public, cyber ponds, melting the plastic plants, boiling the water cooler, and causing all sorts of other disruptions. Before you can ban them though you see that the CEO starts to bring his robot mosquito with laser beams for eyes in too. And he wants you not only support it but to make sure it doesn’t get hacked. Sounds familiar, right?

There will always be new technologies. Many of those new technologies pose new risks, perhaps even risks we hadn’t considered as risky to us before. So someone has to secure those new technologies. But how do we secure something we know so little about? Well, there’s a methodology for that. This talk will cover how to test new technologies, how to create the right policy for them, and how to control them, including robot mosquitoes with laser beams for eyes.

Bio: Pete Herzog is the Managing Director of the security research organization ISECOM and the creator of the OSSTMM.

 

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Chema Alonso: Excel (and Office apps) Kills the Citrix (or Terminal Services) Star

Abstract: Microsoft Office (and Excel) are common applications in big companies and in a big amount of cases they are published through Terminal Services or Citrix. However, securing that environment against malicious users is very complicated. In this talk you’ll see a lot of demos hacking Citrix and Terminal Services using Excel… and maybe you’ll be scared after having seen this session.

Bio: Chema Alonso is a Security Consultant with Informatica64, a Madrid-based security firm. Chema holds respective Computer Science and System Engineering degrees from Rey Juan Carlos University and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. During his more than six years as a security professional, he has consistently been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). Chema is a frequent speaker at industry events (Microsoft Technet / Security Tour, AseguraIT) and has been invited to present at information security conferences worldwide including BlackHat Briefings, Defcon, ShmooCon, HackCON, Ekoparty and RootedCon. He is a frequent contributor on several technical magazines in Spain, where he is involved with state-of-the-art attack and defense mechanisms, web security, general ethical hacking techniques and FOCA, the meta-data extraction tool which he co-authors.

Twitter: @chemaalonso

blog: http://www.elladodelmal.com

 

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Rene Graf & Enno Rey: BYOD – Does it work?

Abstract: In many organizations “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) approaches are either subject to intensive discussion or are already practiced (with or without “proper governance”). Usually two security controls are of particular interest in BYOD scenarios, that are container solutions and acceptable use policies (AUPs).

The speakers have contributed to BYOD “implementations” in several environments and – based on actual case studies – are going to discuss three main aspects in their talk:

– What’s the role of the supply chain of a device, in BYOD settings? Is it possible to securely process – e.g. by means of a container solution – sensitive data on a device that was acquired on ebay or that the VIP using it received “as a present during an industry fair in an emerging market country”?

– What level of security is actually provided by container solutions? Do they sufficiently secure data (incl. temporary data) and which user behavior might be required for this?

– When are good AUPs needed and which elements should be included in those?

The goal of the talk is to enable the audience to realistically assess the security approaches and risks in BYOD scenarios.

Bios: Rene Graf leads the “Mobile Security” team at ERNW and has performed a number of BYOD projects including pentests of container solutions and forensic analyses of devices used by CxOs. Enno Rey leads the “Risk and Security Management” team at ERNW and has undertaken the risk assessments in several BYOD projects and written the accompanying AUPs.

 

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More talks to follow next week, so stay tuned 😉

See you @Troopers, have a great sunday everybody

 

Enno

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Breaking

A Wrap-up on MFD Security

On last year’s TROOPERS11, Matthias (mluft) and I gave a talk on Multifunction Devices. Hardly surprising: It was related to the state of secure operation of MFDs. It was heavily motivated by experiences we collected out in the wild. We faced a frightening low level of awareness concerning the role of MFDs for the overall security picture – in particular regarding the processing of sensitive data…

However, instead of only showing and proving well-known weaknesses and vulnerabilities, we decided to adapt ERNW’s Seven Sisters model in order to match the needs of secure MFD operation and to develop some kind of guideline. As Matthias already lost some words on this, I’m not gonna waste your valuable time by repeating, what has already been said. However I described our approach and our thoughts on that topic in a recently published ERNW Newsletter. If for what ever reason you didn’t see our talk or even didn’t attend TROOPERS11 at all, have a look on Newsletter 37 and give us feedback on what you think about the whole topic…

Btw: Enno just wrote some lines about what’s so special about the TROOPERS conference. In case you might want to discuss mentioned and related topics at first hand, think about joining TROOPERS12. For our part, we cannot wait to come together at Heidelberg next March.

See you there
Michael alias Micele

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Events, Misc

“What’s so special about Troopers?”

This week I stayed some days in Zurich, to give a workshop and to meet both clients and fellow researchers (kudos again to C. for the awesome office tour @Google). In the course of one of those dinners somehow Troopers was mentioned and a guy asked: “I’ve heard of the conference. What’s so special about it?”

Funnily enough I didn’t even have to respond myself as a 2011 attendee coincidentally present at the table jumped in and started praising the event (“best con ever. great spirit, great talks”). Obviously this gave me a big grin… but it reminded as well me that some of you might ask themselves the very same question.

In my opening remarks of the 2011 edition I tried to describe the Troopers approach and spirit. You can find it here. As for the speakers’ perspective I’d like to point you to this blogpost that Chema (Alonso) wrote before the 2010 edition. It pretty much summarizes how we take care of “our rock stars”…

Btw: the CfP will be open in some days. As in the previous years, there are only few slots left (as most are already assigned to hand-selected speakers).

See you there in 2012, have a great weekend

Enno

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Events

A Sneak Peek into TROOPERS12

TROOPERS11 Speaker badgesHere we go again: TROOPERS12 is scheduled for March 19th – 23rd 2012 in Heidelberg, Germany.

Those who attended TROOPERS before know for what we are up to. For all newcomers I’ll quickly outline what’s going to happen:

TROOPERS is your premium IT security event in Europe. Think of your usual IT educational event without annoying sales pitching and outdated topics. Now add a superb conference location, an elite line-up of international researchers and practitioners as well as an organizing team not dedicated to make a living doing this, but to celebrate our craftsmanship together with like-minded people.

Sounds good? Let’s see what we have planned for you:

Monday & Tuesday

We start with a great selection of workshops. You’ll have a bigger choice than ever before:

One-day workshops on Monday:

  • Advanced IPv6 Security
  • Android Security
  • CloudSec
  • ISECOM Workshop (to be announced shortly) 

One-day workshops on Tuesday:

  • Advanced Email Security
  • iOS Security
  • ISECOM’s “Smarter, Safer, Better” security awareness training
Special event on Tuesday:

We call it the “TelcoSec Day” – A workshop that assembles researchers and practitioners in the telecommunications operator security space. Invitation only. Please drop us an email, if you think you should be part of it.

Two-day boot camp on Monday and Tuesday:

Chema playing Minesweeper

  • Hacking 101 – Your personal preparation for PacketWars (and beyond…)

Wednesday & Thursday

These are the main conference days. Expect more than 20 international researchers coming in to present on their latest discoveries – ready to share their experience with you. In order to serve you with the latest and greatest we won’t announce a final agenda yet. Topics of already confirmed talks include:

  • Web Application Firewalls
  • iCloud
  • SAP Hacking
  • Quantum Cryptography
  • Bioinformatics

Friday

Orange TROOPERS flagWe’ll finish up with a bunch of roundtable sessions. This is the perfect place to recap the week’s happenings and look ahead on upcoming developments.

Something is missing right?

A TROOPERS conference is more than a yearly get-together of some IT guys. This event is for enthusiasts, idealists and doers of all nationalities, age groups and sexes. Our common denominator is the passion for what we do and the strong belief that we will succeed in the daily battle of IT security. Professionals from various backgrounds are longing for an environment where their thoughts, work and experience is appreciated and amplified.

TROOPERS11 electronic badgeTherefore we spare no efforts to do just that. To name just a few highlights of your complimentary supporting program:

  • Shared dinner in the Old Town
  • PacketWars hacking contest
  • 10k Morning run to keep you going
  • [TOP SECRET] Competition

Registration

Registration is open now. Head over to the sign up page and make yourself familiar with all the deals we offer. Please contact us, if you need any assistance or guidance on your selection.

We’re looking forward to meet you soon,
Florian & the TROOPERS/ERNW crew

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Events

TROOPERS11 – Slides available

TROOPERS11 slides are available now! Please find them here: http://www.troopers.de/troopers11/downloads/

TROOPERS11 was a blast! We received great feedback from all attendees and speakers. This really pushes ourselves towards the next goals and an even better security conference in 2012.

We’re happy that everybody got home safely with new ideas and inspirations in mind. On a side note: The awesome TROOPERS badge caused trouble for some of you with the airport security 😉 I really hope everybody could find a way to take it back home. It will hopefully find its way to an adequate place right next to your old memorabilia (cup of the first won soccer match, your college degree or photos from your first ballet show). Regard it as the proof of your latest achievement and tell everybody proud and loud: WE ARE TROOPERS.

Best regards,
Florian

PS: Videos and photos are coming soon. Stay tuned.

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Troopers 2011 – First round of speakers selected

We’re delighted to announce the first speakers of next year’s Troopers edition. Looks like it’s going to be a great event again ;-).
Here we go:

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Ravishankar Borgaonkar & Kevin Redon: Femtocell: Femtostep to the Holy Grail  (Attacks & Research Track)

Abstract: Femtocells are now being rolled out across the world to enhance third generation (3G) coverage and to provide assurance of always best connectivity in the 3G telecommunication networks. It acts as an access point that securely connect standard mobile handset to the mobile network operator’s core network using an existing wired broadband connection.

In this talk, we will evaluate security mechanisms used in femtocells and discuss practical & potential misuse scenarios of the same. In particular, our talk will cover:

# Femtocell and Telecom business model
# Security architecture of the femtocell
# Location verification techniques and how to beat them for free roaming calls
# Hacking of the device
 -r00ting
 -accessing confidential information stored on the device
 -installing malicious applications on the device
 -accessing mobile network operator’s infrastructural elements
# Possible countermeasures
# Demo

Bios: Ravi received his joint master degree in Security and mobile computing from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and from Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). After finishing his master degree, he works as a researcher in the the Security in Telecommunications department at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-labs) and is pursuing his PhD studies. His research themes are related to data security challenges in new telecommunication technologies. His research interest includes Wireless networking security (in particular, security in 2G/3G networks), M2M security, and malware & botnet analysis.
Kevin received bachelor of Computing from Napier University Edinburgh, Scotland. He is now finishing his Master degree in Computing with specialization in Communication Systems at the Technical University of Berlin. This is also where he joined the Security in Telecommunication work group in cooperation with the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-labs). His research interest includes network security, in particular telecommunication network as GSM/UMTS, peer to peer networks, and smart cards.
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Mariano Nuñez Di Croce: Your crown jewels online – Attacks to SAP Web Applications  (Defense & Management Track)

Abstract: “SAP platforms are only accessible internally”. You may have heard that several times. While that was true in many organizations more than a decade ago, the current situation is completely different: driven by modern business requirements, SAP systems are getting more and more connected to the Internet. This scenario drastically increases the universe of possible attackers, as remote malicious parties can try to compromise the organization’s SAP platform in order to perform espionage, sabotage and fraud attacks.
SAP provides different Web interfaces, such as the Enterprise Portal, the Internet Communication Manager (ICM) and the Internet Transaction Server (ITS). These components feature their own security models and technical infrastructures, which may be prone to specific security vulnerabilities. If exploited, your business crown jewels can end up in the hands of cyber criminals.
Through many live demos, this talk will explain how remote attackers may compromise the security of different SAP Web components and what you can do to avoid it. In particular, an authentication-bypass vulnerability affecting “hardened” SAP Enterprise Portal implementations will be detailed.

Bio: Mariano Nuñez Di Croce is the Director of Research and Development at Onapsis. Mariano has a long experience as a Senior Security Consultant, mainly involved in security assessments and vulnerability research. He has discovered critical vulnerabilities in SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM applications.
Mariano leads the SAP Security Team at Onapsis, where he works hardening and assessing the security of critical SAP implementations in world-wide organizations. He is the author and developer of the first open-source SAP & ERP Penetration Testing Frameworks and has discovered more than 50 vulnerabilities in SAP applications. Mariano is also the lead author of the “SAP Security In-Depth” publication and founding member of BIZEC, the Business Security community.
Mariano has been invited to hold presentations and trainings in many international security conferences such as BlackHat USA/EU, HITB Dubai/EU, DeepSec, Sec-T, Hack.lu, Ekoparty and Seacure.it as well as to host private trainings for Fortune-100 companies and defense contractors. He has also been interviewed and quoted in mainstream media such as Reuters, IDG, NY Times, PCWorld and others.
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Friedwart Kuhn & Michael Thumann: Integration of the New German ID Card (nPA) in Enterprise Environments – Prospects, Costs & Threats    (Defense & Management Track)

Abstract: The talk will cover the new nPA and related software like the AusweisApp with a special focus on possible use cases in the enterprise (“have the government run your corporate PKI” ;-)). Besides outlining prerequisites for an integration of the nPA within an organization, it will also answer questions about legal aspects that have to be considered and threats and risks that must be controlled and mitigated. Furthermore we will give a short overview about our own security research of the AusweisApp.

Bios: Friedwart Kuhn is a senior security consultant, head of the ERNW PKI team and co-owner of ERNW. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and has published a number of whitepapers and articles. Besides the daily consulting and assessment work, Windows enterprise security and aspects of technical and organizational PKI related topics are areas of special interest for him. In his (sparse) free time Friedwart likes to play music and loves literature.
Michael Thumann is Chief Security Officer and head of the ERNW “Research” and “Pen-Test” teams. He has published security advisories regarding topics like ‘Cracking IKE Preshared Keys’ and buffer overflows in web servers/VPN software/VoIP software. Michael enjoys sharing his self-written security tools (e.g. ‘tomas—a Cisco Password Cracker’, ikeprobe—IKE PSK Vulnerability Scanner’ or ‘dnsdigger—a dns information gathering tool’) and his experience with the community. Next to numerous articles and papers he wrote the first German Pen-Test Book that has become a recommended reading at German universities. In addition to his daily pentesting tasks he is a regular conference speaker and has also contributed exploit code to the Metasploit Framework. With more than 10 years of experience in computer security Michael’s main interest is to uncover vulnerabilities and security design flaws from the network to the application level.

 
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Chema Alonso: I FOCA a .mil domain (Attacks & Research Track)

Abstract: FOCA is a tool to help you in the fingerprinting phase among a pentesting work. This tool helps you to find lost data, hidden information in public documents, fingerprinting servers, workstations, etc.
This talk will provide an extensive demo as a good example of the results which can be obtained using FOCA. The target domain? You’ll see in Troopers…

Chema is a Computer Engineer by the Rey Juan Carlos University and System Engineer by the Politecnica University of Madrid. He has been working as security consultant in the last ten years and had been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional since 2005 to present time. He is a frequent speaker at security conferences and is currently working on his PhD thesis about Blind Techniques.
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Graeme Neilson: Tales from the Crypt0 (Defense & Management Track)

Abstract: Does the thought of SSL, HTTPS and S/MIME make you squeamish? Does PKI make you want to scream? Does encrypting data at rest make you want to bury yourself alive?
Cryptography is an important part of most web applications these days, and developers and admins need to understand how, why and when to employ the best and appropriate techniques to secure their servers, applications, data and the livelihoods of their users. Join Graeme Neilson (Aura Software Security) for a series of scary stories of real-world crypto failures and to learn how to do it the right way (with lots of code samples).

Bio: Graeme Neilson is lead security researcher at Aura Software Security based in Wellington, New Zealand. Originally from Scotland he has 10 years of
security experience. Graeme specialises in secure networks, network infrastructure, reverse engineering and cryptanalysis. Graeme is a regular presenter at international security conferences and has spoken at conferences in Australia, Europe and the US including Black Hat.
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More talks to follow soon. See you in Heidelberg next year,

thanks

Enno

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TROOPERS10 presentation materials finally online

I’m happy to announce that the presentations and a majority of the videos from TROOPERS10 are finally available to you.

You’ll find the slides at the conference’s website troopers.de, more precisely here. Plenty of videos were uploaded and are now ready for streaming at viddler.com/TROOPERS. Enjoy!

Please excuse the long waiting time – this is a big point on our ‘improvements for upcoming events’ list. Talking about improvements: If you have any suggestions, criticism or even praise for past or upcoming events – let us know in the comment section.

Thanks,
Florian

PS: At the moment I’m doing the finishing touches to some really nice photos from TROOPERS10. To stay up-to-date please subscribe to our RSS feed or if you’re into twitter: Follow @WEareTROOPERS 😉

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