ShmooCon

Hey guys,
as some of you may have noticed, just recently at ShmooCon we gave our talk “LTE vs. Darwin” (Slides here). There we presented some results of our research in 4G telco network security. Some of those originate from our research contribution to ASMONIA, but we expanded the scope and also took a look at the air interface. Both the air interface and the backend links & protocols must be secured appropriately; otherwise communication may be eavesdropped or sensitive information may be compromised. In the following we want to provide an overview of LTE main components and potential attack vectors.

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Last weekend, from 17 to 19 January, ShmooCon was held in Washington, DC. A number of different topics was covered in great talks and we want to give you a short overview of the conference. In the following our favorite talks are briefly summarized.

Privacy Online: What Now?
Ian Goldberg, one of the designers of the OTR Protocol, gave the keynote on the first day. His talk was quite interesting and he presented some really nice approaches, one of those being an attack against PGP. He described the attack as follows: an attacker could copy a key server by downloading all the stored keys. If this is done it is possible to create new key pairs with exactly the same settings as the keys downloaded. The third step is to create all the signing links between the keys as they exist on the real key server. Finally, the attacker uploads these new keys including the signing links to the original key server.
Now, in case Alice wants to retrieve the public key of Bob, Alice would find two keys with seemingly identical properties. If choosing the wrong key for encryption the message will be decipherable by the attacker and in case of MitM situation be accessed. Furthermore, if Alice then signs the “mirror key”, the cloned keys and the original would merge, resulting in further problems.
This was just one consideration discussed in Goldberg’s talk. For the full content, watch the recording, available soon on ShmooCon page.

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We are back from ShmooCon had a great time and it was a lot of fun talking to all of you guys. Here are the slides of our talk. Thanks to all who made this possible, we really enjoyed being part of this years Shmoo.

cheers

/daniel and pascal

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Once more ShmooCon is the place to be for some days in late January. Great con, great people and five ERNW guys amongst them 😉

We regard Shmoo(Con) as one of the most important community events at all and it allows us to meet fellow researchers from the US who we can’t easily sit down with to chat very often.

And some lucky guys from ERNW will even continue the trip to head to San Diego (!) for NANOG and NDSS. Not to mention they stay in some fancy beach resort ;-), while I myself fly back today. (Getting older I don’t enjoy staying away from home for a week anymore and I have been missing my kids since some days…)

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