Hello everybody and welcome to the second part of our 32C3 recap!
In case you didn’t see the first part, make sure to check it out 😉
Logjam
by **Nadia Heninger & Alex Halderman
**Video | Slides
This talk was held by Nadia Heninger and Alex Halderman on the second day of the congress. Both work in academic and the field of cryptology. They talked about the “Logjam”-Attack they and several colleagues discovered and published in may of 2014. They started their talk by explaining how they uncovered the vulnerability which was quite interesting since Logjam was no breaking news anymore. And well it was inspired by the congress of the year before, 31C3. The research was conducted because they got curious how the NSA might be able to decrypt VPN traffic as stated by Jacob Applebaum and Laura Poitras in their “reconstructing narratives” talk.
As every year some of us used the holidays to visit the Chaos Communication Congress to socialize with like-minded people and to hear interesting talks.
I mean what other reasons than learning about security might exist to leave behind all your lovely in-laws you’ve been sharing some relative’s house with the days before … 😉
Here is a short recap of some of the talks we found most interesting:
Mining for Bugs with Graph Database Queries by Fabian Yamaguchi Video
One of my favorite talks at this years congress was about the open source tool joern, a code analysis platform for C/C++ applications. Fabian, the main author of joern, presented his work on vulnerability discovery in large code bases. One of the key points of his work is robustness, meaning that the resulting tools should produce meaningful results in large and noisy real world projects even if this results in a loss of accuracy. The second important point is that tools should assist human auditors, not replace them, which seems to be one of the more interesting current research directions (see also this paper). At its core joern combines standard compiler technology with modern graph databases to offer auditors a powerful way to search for certain code constructs. To do this joern parses source code into an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) and creates the corresponding CFG (Control Flow Graph), as well as a Data Dependency Graph (PDG) for all functions. This creates the Code Property Graph which combines all three representation forms into a single unified layer.
The Code Property Graph is stored inside a graph database (joern uses neo4j), which can be queried using a powerful graph traversal language named gremlin (https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki). The combination of gremlin with some wrapper tools included in joern gives an auditor the possibility to construct powerful search queries against the code base. Fabian presented different queries he used to search for vulnerabilities in the VLC video player, as well as the Linux kernel that resulted in really impressive results (and a high number of discovered vulnerabilities). Joern is definitely a tool you should check out and I’m looking forward to more impressive research by its author.
– Felix
We wish you a happy new year and a good start to 2014. A new year has begun and, just before that, 30C3 took place. I think almost all of you have heard about the congress and its topics. In particukar there was Glenn Greenwald’s keynote or there were new publications/revelations by Jacob Appelbaum, which you will probably have heard about from main media.
But besides of all that, there were really a lot of other interesting talks we want to give you a short introduction to. Overall it was a really good conference this year and a lot of awesome talks. But, like always, it is not possible to see all of them, so here is a short summary of some of our favorites: