TROOPERS on Insinuator.net - Bold Statements

#TROOPERS26 AD & Entra ID Security Track

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The #TROOPERS26 ‘AD & Entra ID Security’ track delivered an incredible experience – much like the entire conference! We were thrilled to host some of the brightest minds in identity research alongside a highly engaged audience who brought valuable insights to the roundtable discussions. While the presentation slides have already been published on the TROOPERS website, several speakers have shared complementary tools, in-depth blog posts, and active social media threads. To make things easy, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of all these fantastic resources from the track below.

TROOPERS26: Integrating Incident Analysis and Digital Forensics Tooling for Automated Compromise Detection

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I gave a talk at #TROOPERS26: Integrating Incident Analysis and Digital Forensics Tooling for Automated Compromise Detection. I discussed the challenges of incident analysis, such as increasing storage capacities and the lack of integration between tools. I presented a modular framework that integrates established forensic and analysis tools using a decision-tree-based control mechanism. A workflow was designed to control the execution of 14 integrated analysis tools in order to reproduce the manual analysis process usually performed by analysts. Moreover, the framework is capable of identifying whether a system has been compromised and compiles a analyst-oriented report. Together with the audience we took a look at the report in a live demonstration. The evaluation results of the framework were promising as it was able to identify all compromised systems. However, a significant number of false positive classifications were also observed. To improve the framework possible future extensions include functionality such as recovering already deleted files to detect missed Indicators of Compromise. Additionally, our team want to integrate artificial intelligence in the workflow to help in data processing and make more decisions automatically. The slides will be published next week on the conference website. I will add the link in this blog post when they become available. A more detailed description of the content of the talk can be found in the following sections. Looking forward to #TROOPERS27!

Heads-up: TROOPERS Roundtable – Supply Chain Security

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How to strengthen Supply Chain Security: Practical Exchange and Roadmap

Join an open, practitioner-focused roundtable for direct exchange on supply chain security. This session offers a concise overview of core concepts, e.g. SBOM, CSAF, and VEX and digs into the processes behind them: how to obtain, process and apply information to improve security across the supply chain.

We will examine:

How SBOM, CSAF and VEX relate and why version-level detail matters.
The practical value of an SBOM and why it’s increasingly required by law and IT procurement.
How to create and consume SBOMs?
Methods to identify dependencies in the context of vulnerabilities.
Approaches to triage: not all vulnerabilities affect every stakeholder equally.
Techniques to analyze vulnerabilities and identify affected products and product families.
Sources of vulnerability information and how to map data unambiguously to products and specific software versions.
Reporting obligations: where and how to disclose vulnerabilities.
Tools and automation that help manage information volume and complexity.
Technical, organizational and personnel challenges to achieving end-to-end supply chain security.
The role of AI in supply chain security.
How do we protect ourselves from malicious actors / infected dependencies?
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA): implications for companies, products and consumers, the CRA roadmap, and concrete deadlines and actions.
We will show a live demonstration of the whole process, e.g. covering the consumption of SBOMs, vulnerability identification and assessment, creation of VEX documents.

This roundtable is designed for security practitioners, product owners, compliance officers and decision-makers who want actionable guidance and peer discussion. Expect candid conversation, real-world examples and next steps you can take to strengthen resilience across your supply chains.

#TROOPERS25 AD & Entra ID Security Track

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The #TROOPERS25 ‘AD & Entra ID Security’ track was a blast – as was the whole conference 😉 – bringing together some of the smartest researchers in the field and a great audience of practitioners willing to share their experiences during the roundtable. The slides of the talks have been released in the interim on the TROOPERS website, but since many speakers published additional blogposts or released tools, we provide a compilation of resources from the track in the following.

Security Advisory: Airoha-based Bluetooth Headphones and Earbuds

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Important note: Some media coverage on this topic falsely or inaccurately depicts the attack conditions. To be clear: Any vulnerable device can be compromised if the attacker is in Bluetooth range. That is the only precondition.

During our research on Bluetooth headphones and earbuds, we identified several vulnerabilities in devices that incorporate Airoha Systems on a Chip (SoCs). In this blog post, we briefly want to describe the vulnerabilities, point out their impact and provide some context to currently running patch delivery processes as described at this year’s TROOPERS Conference.

Windows Hello for Business – Past and Present Attacks

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Windows Hello for Business is a key component of Microsoft’s passwordless authentication strategy. It enables user authentication not only during system sign-in but also in conjunction with new and advanced features such as Personal Data Encryption, Administrator Protection, and Recall. Rather than depending on traditional passwords, Windows Hello leverages a PIN or biometric methods – such as fingerprint or facial recognition – to unlock cryptographic keys protected by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

BMBF UNCOVER – Monitoring von Sicherheitsvorfällen in Fahrzeugen

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

English Abstract

For the realization and introduction of autonomous vehicles, the safe interaction of functions, systems and services as well as their monitoring over the entire product life cycle is essential. An exclusive security-by-design approach is no longer sufficient and must be continuously supported by feedback obtained from in-the-wild operation. This is where the recently successfully completed joint project BMBF UNCOVER comes into play, which targets the requirements of the standards ISO/SAE 21434 (Road vehicles – Cybersecurity engineering) and ISO 21448 (Road vehicles – Safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF)).

TROOPERS24 Agenda Preview: Active Directory & Entra ID Security Track

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,

are you curious about the agenda of the Active Directory- & Entra ID security track at TROOPERS24? Here’s a sneak peak of the already published tracks:

Wednesday, 2024-06-26:

A Decade of Active Directory Attacks: What We’ve Learned & What’s Next – Sean Metcalf
ADillesHeel: Making the Impossible Possible in AD Attack Path Analysis – SHANG-DE JIANG
So You Performed A Forest Recovery. How Do You Reconnect Your AD Again With Azure AD? – Jorge de Almeida Pinto
Decrypting the Directory: A Journey into a static analysis of the Active Directory NTDS to identify misconfigurations and vulnerabilities – Bastien Cacace (XMCO company)
Say Hello to your new cache flow! – Geoffrey Bertoli, Rémi Jullian
Analyzing and Executing ADCS Attack Paths with BloodHound – by Andy Robbins, Jonas Bülow Knudsen

Thursday, 2024-06-27:

The (almost) complete LDAP guide – Sapir Federovsky
Exploiting Token-Based Authentication: Attacking and Defending Identities in the 2020s – Dr Nestori Syynimaa
Attacking Primary Refresh Tokens using their MacOS implementation – Olaf Hartong, Dirk-jan Mollema
Misconfiguration Manager: Overlooked and Overprivileged – Duane Michael, Chris Thompson
The Registry Rundown – Cedric Van Bockhaven, Max Grim

The full conference agenda including timeslots will be published soon at TROOPERS24. The trainings are already sold out, but a handful of tickets is currently left. Stay tuned & make the world a safer place!

Lua-Resty-JWT Authentication Bypass

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was writing some challenges for PacketWars at TROOPERS22. One was intended to be a JWT key confusion challenge where the public key from an RSA JWT should be recovered and used to sign a symmetric JWT. For that, I was searching for a library vulnerable to JWT key confusion by default and found lua-resty-jwt. The original repository by SkyLothar is not maintained and different from the library that is installed with the LuaRocks package manager. The investigated library is a fork of the original repository, maintained by cdbattags in version 0.2.3 and was downloaded more than 4.8 million times according to LuaRocks.

All your parcel are belong to us – Talk at Troopers 2023

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At Troopers 2023, we gave a talk on how to attack DHL parcel tracking information based on OSINT. Since we previously had an exemplary disclosure process about this attack with DHL, Mr. Kiehne (from DHL) joined us to provide interesting background information and insights on how they addressed our findings.

We want to thank DHL and especially Mr. Kiehne for sharing those insights with us at Troopers 2023. It is the ideal case, but still not common that organizations talk openly about their actions and views on a disclosure process.

Summary of 'Software-Defined Radio applied to security assessments' at Troopers21

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The training Software-Defined Radio applied to security assessments was held by Sébastien Dudek at Troopers21 and was remotely organized – like most other events – due to Covid-19. Once we were all caffeinated, we had an exciting journey through basically all things radio.

We started with the technical and physical basics in radio technology, such as various sorts of antennas, analog to digital coding (and backward), encoding schemes, and general risks and possible vulnerabilities of using radio devices. Commonly found vulnerabilities include the following:

TROOPERS20 Training Teaser: Attack And Defence In AWS: Chaining Vulnerabilities To Go Beyond The OWASP Top 10

Thu, 27 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Attackers are everywhere. They are now on the cloud too! Attacking the most popular cloud provider – AWS, requires the knowledge of how different services are setup, what defences do we need to bypass, what service attributes can be abused, where can information be leaked, how do I escalate privileges, what about monitoring solutions that may be present in the environment and so on! We try to answer these questions in our intense, hands-on scenario driven training on attacking and subsequently defending against the attacks on AWS.

TROOPERS20 Training Teaser: Hacking Node.js & Electron apps, shells, injections and fun!

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Did you know that in the ever evolving field of Web and Desktop apps, it turns out these can all now be powered with JavaScript? You read that right: JavaScript is now used to power both web apps (Node.js) as well as Desktop apps (Electron). What could possibly go wrong?

So, the burning question is: how does this affect Web and Desktop app security? If you want to find out, come to our training and you will experience this in a 100% hands-on fashion! 🙂

TROOPERS20 Training Teaser: TLS in the Enterprise – Post Quantum Security

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our workshop “TLS in the enterprise” was held for the first time at Troopers 2018 and was our special contribution to the IT Security world to increase the usage of TLS and point out the pitfalls, when switching to TLS.

But time is changing and TLS is a kind of standard nowadays, at least when looking at HTTPS, but there are still a lot of things to do regarding other protocols like

TROOPERS20 Training Teaser: Swim with the whales – Docker, DevOps & Security in Enterprise Environments

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Containerization dominates the market nowadays. Fancy buzzwords like continuous integration/deployment/delivery, microservices, containers, DevOps are floating around, but what do they mean? What benefits do they offer compared to the old dogmas? You’re gonna find out in our training!

We are going to start with the basics of Docker, Containers and DevOps, but soon you’ll end up with your own applications running inside containers with the images residing in your own registry. Of course, following the microservices approach, and the second day hasn’t even started.After the fundamental topics of containerization are understood, you’re going to create and operate your own Kubernetes cluster. A lot of fun and challenging exercises lie ahead, to give you hands-on experience with all the technologies.

TROOPERS20 teaser: Hacking mobile apps

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“If it’s a thing, then there’s an app for it!”…We trust mobile apps to process our bank transactions, handle our private data and set us up on romantic dates. However, few of us care to wonder,”How (in)secure can these apps be?” Well… at Troopers 20, you can learn how to answer this question yourself!

In our 2 day long “Hacking mobile apps” workshop, we teach how to find security vulnerabilities in mobile apps, exploit them and defend against them. We start from scratch, therefore no prior experience in hacking or developing mobile apps is required. Whether you want to learn how to pentest mobile apps, you are an app developer that fancies to secure his/her apps, or just curios, our workshop is a jumpstart to your goal.

TROOPERS20 Training Teaser: Insight Into Windows Internals

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Windows 10 is one of the most commonly deployed operating systems at this time. Knowledge about its components and internal working principles is highly beneficial. Among other things, such a knowledge enables:

in-depth studies of undocumented, or poorly documented, system functionalities;
development of performant and compatible software to monitor or extend the activities of the operating system itself; and
analysis of security-related issues, such as persistent malware.

The “Insight into Windows Internals” training offered at TROOPERS20 delivers knowledge on the core components and inner working principles of Windows 10. For example, the training provides knowledge on how Windows 10 uses virtualization to isolate security-critical functionalities from attackers that have managed to compromise the system. The training includes a variety of practical exercises allowing attendees to observe first-hand the operation of Windows 10.

TROOPERS20 Training Teaser: Hacking 101

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hi there,
like in recent years the popular Hacking 101 workshop will take place on TROOPERS20, too! The workshop will give you an insight into the hacking techniques required for penetration testing. These techniques will cover various topics:

Information gathering
Network scanning
Web application hacking
Low-level exploitation

…and more!

During this workshop you will learn, step by step, a testing methodology that applies to the majority of scenarios. So imagine you have to assess the security of a system running on the Internet. How would you start? First, you need a good understanding of the target, including running services or related systems. Just scanning the target’s IP address will most likely not reveal all relevant information you can get. In the information gathering step, you will learn where you could find more relevant information than just a list of open ports. A brief understanding of the target and it’s related systems/services/applications will make scanning and identifying vulnerabilities a lot easier and more effective. Then, the last step will be the exploitation of the identified vulnerabilities, with the ultimate aim to get access to the target system and pivot to other, probably internal, systems and resources.

TROOPERS20 Training Teaser: Windows & Linux Binary Exploitation

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We are happy to announce that TROOPERS20 will feature the 5th anniversary of the popular Windows & Linux Binary Exploitation workshop!

In this workshop, attendees will learn how to exploit those nasty stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities by applying the theoretical methods taught in this course to hands-on exercises. Exercises will be performed for real world (32-bit) software such as the Foxit Reader Plugin for Firefox, Wireshark, and nginx.

Each exercise will start with an initially uncontrolled overwrite of the instruction pointer register by a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability. From there on, we will work our way through many obstacles to finally gain remote code execution. Obstacles that will be encountered during the exercises include modern stack-based buffer overflow defense mechanisms such as stack cookies, data execution prevention (DEP), and address space layout randomization (ASLR). For all of these defense mechanisms, attendees will learn and apply certain methods to bypass the protection.

TelcoSecDay 2020 CFP is open

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We are back again with another TelcoSecDay 2020 (TSD20) which is going to happen on March 16th, 2020 as an additional event to TROOPERS. This year, it is going to be on Monday of the TROOPERS week. We are delighted to inform that the event is happening for the 9th year in a row. The CFP is open now. If you have an interesting topic related to the field of Telco Security, please make a submission. The deadline is November 17, 2019. The final notification for TSD submission is December 20, 2019.

Troopers 19 – Badge Hardware

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post by Jeff (@jeffmakes) was delayed due to interferences with other projects but nevertheless, enjoy!

This year, it was my great honour to design the hardware for the Troopers19 badge.

We wanted to make a wifi-connected MicroPython-powered badge; something that would be fun to take home and hack on. It was a nice opportunity to use a microcontroller platform that I hadn’t tried before. I also used the project as a chance to finally migrate my PCB workflow from Eagle to Kicad. Inevitably it was a painful transition, which resulted in quite some delay to the project as I floundered around in the new tool, but it does mean the design files are in an open format which I hope will benefit the community of Troopers attendees and future badge designers!

#TR19 Next Generation Internet (NGI) Summaries

Thu, 02 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS19 Active Directory Security Track.

Microsoft IT (Secure) Journey to IPv6-Only

Veronika McKillop, Network Architect, Cloud and Connectivity Engineering (CCE)

The speaker, Veronika McKillop, working at Microsofts network infrastructure services, has given a talk about the process of switching a company network from IPv4 to IPv6-only.

Within the talk the following topics were introduced: Dual Stack, Drivers for IPv6, Status of IPv6 in Networks and Security in IPv6 Networks. The talk covers the reasons why a company would like to switch from IPv4 to IPv6. Technics like NAT64 and DNS64 are introduced. The requirements to software and especially drivers to work in IPv6 environments are described. Also the problems to switch from IPv4 to IPv6-only in heterogeneous networks are addressed.

#TR19 Active Directory Security Summaries

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS19 Active Directory Security Track.

From Workstation to Domain Admin: Why Secure Administration Isn’t Secure and How to Fix It by Sean Metcalf

Active Directory is probably used in almost every corporation today to administer all kinds of Authorization, Authentication and Privileges. This means they are valuable targets for attackers, because once compromised they could do whatever they want. This would be the worst case scenario, right? Therefore securing AD is important and this year TROOPERS19 featured a whole track solely for AD Security.

#TR19 Attack & Research Summaries

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS19 Attack & Research Track.

VXLAN Security or Injection, and protection

The talk “VXLAN Security or Injection, and protection” was held by Henrik Lund Kramshøj, who is the owner of Zencurity ApS, a small security company located in Denmark.

Henrik gives an overview about lesser known VXLAN insecurities, mostly packet spoofing.

In the end he gives advice how to protect against this attacks.

Troopers & Chill…

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As promised in my previous post, I am back for an overview of the Troopers19 – Active Directory related talks… Videos have been published and it’s popcorn time… So if you are into stories about Kingdoms and Crown Jewels, grab your loved one [or a drink…] and turn the lights down low, ’cause tonight it’s “Troopers & Chill…”

Warning: Don’t watch it all in one go… or you will start to feel some anxiety and pain…
and then the Flying Dutchman will move to the cloud… And at that point we are not insured anymore.

Troopers 19 – Hack your badge

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Sadly, TROOPERS 19 is already over. I had great fun meeting all of you, helping you with your badge problems and seeing others hacking on their badges for example to get custom images on there.

With this year’s badge we wanted to give you something you can reuse after the conference, learn new things new build something on your own.

As promised in our talk Jeff and I would like to give you a short introduction into the badge internals. Along with this post we will release the source code for the badge firmware, the provisioning server and the schematics for the PCB.

The “mmm…” in Community

Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When I got home last weekend after an awesome week at WEareTROOPERS, my 5yr old asked me what actually happened in Heidelberg…
I told him we were meeting with some people from all over the world to talk about computer security, and he asked me if it was “to stop the bad guys, like super-heroes?”. So I told him “yes, kind of…”, and he decided he would take his new Troopers T-Shirt to school on Monday to show his classmates. Kids are truly amazing… [<3 <3 <3]

Binaries, shellcoding, bug hunting, ROP gadgets and more at Blackhoodie@TR19

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We have the most amazing trainers this year lined up for Blackhoodie at Troopers 2019. We have Thais, Silvia, Lisa and Ninon going to give workshops on various interesting topics! Below are some of the workshop contents:

64-bit shellcoding and introduction to buffer overflow exploitation on Linux by Silvia Väli

64-bit shellcoding and introduction to buffer overflow exploitation on Linux is a 3 hour workshop which is essentially divided into 3 parts:

Introduction to 64-bit architecture in order to get familiar with registers, stack, calling conventions described in the Intel 64 (x86-64) architecture manual and the most common assembly instructions and syscalls which we will later use to write our shellcodes.
Shellcoding where we try different techniques to write the shellcode and of course you gonna get to greet the shellcoding world with your own Hello World shellcode in addition to reverse shell which we will use later on in part 3
Introduction to buffer overflows, so you can put your newly received know-how about stack into practise right away. Shellcode without being used is a wasted shellcode! Part 3 ends with a buffer overflow challenge where your goal is to use your reverse shellcode to get a connection back to your machine.

Objectives:

IPv6 Address Management / The “External” Flag

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’re regularly asked to review IPv6 address plans from different organizations and I’d like to share some reflections from such a process currently happening. I’ve discussed a few aspects of IPv6 address planning before; those readers interested please see this post which contains some references.

The organization in question is headquartered in Germany, has ~60K employees and a number of subsidiaries in European countries. They belong to a “traditional industry sector” (so they’re not an “Internet company”, even though they – as the majority of large organizations right now – strive to be one in a few years ;-).

Some Notes on the IPv6 Properties of the Wireless Network @ Cisco Live Europe

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some years ago Christopher wrote two posts (2016, 2015) about the IPv6-related characteristics of the WiFi network at Cisco Live Europe. To somewhat continue this tradition and for mere technical interest I had a look at some properties of this year’s setting.

There were two SSIDs of interest: a dual-stacked one (“CiscoLive2019”) and one with v6-only plus NAT64 (“CL-NAT64”). For some background on the underlying infrastructure components you might look at this thread by Nicolas Darchis from the NOC or at this tweet from Dominik Pickhardt. Some stats on IPv6 usage at CLEUR can be found here.

TelcoSecDay 2019 – First talks preview

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This year we had some excellent submissions for TelcoSecDay. Here are the first four confirmed speakers who are going to talk about the below mentioned topics:

1. Telecom protocols revisited – Not just a signalling problem – by Fredrik Söderlund

A look at the design of the currently deployed signalling protocols for core networks, both SS7 and Diameter (legacy and LTE). Peculiar quirks and how the design has lead to the industry sometimes failing to adhere to its own standards.

#TR19 Active Directory Security Track

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As some of you might recall we’ve introduced a dedicated “Active Directory Security Track” at last year’s Troopers. For Troopers19 we’ve expanded it to two days (as the SAP Security Track was discontinued), and in the following I’ll provide a list of talks in the track.

Vincent Le Toux: You “try” to detect mimikatz

Abstract: This is 2019 and you still “try” to detect mimikatz. “Try”, because after many years, this post exploitation tool continues to be successful.
As a contributor to mimikatz and also a blue team guy, I’m asking myself why antivirus vendors are unable to catch it after many years.
How can a tool be blocked if nobody does not know what this tool is doing? Because surprisingly, it is known only for credential collection but mimikatz is a lot more.
To mitigate the lack of antivirus vendor, should we buy new fancy EDR tool or try a technical approach? Apply a Framework? Rely on Compliance? Use a SIEM to collect logs and apply correlation? In sumarry, can we detect mimikatz?
In this presentation we will try to understand why mimikatz has such power and especially some weakness related to credential gathering and active directory will be exposed.

TROOPERS19 Training Teaser: Hacking mobile applications

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“If it’s a thing, then there’s an app for it!”…We trust mobile apps to process our bank transactions, handle our private data and set us up on romantic dates. However, few of us care to wonder,”How (in)secure can these apps be?” Well… at Troopers 19, you can learn how to answer this question yourself!

In our 2 day long “Hacking mobile applications” workshop, we teach how to find security vulnerabilities in mobile apps, exploit them and defend against them. We start from scratch, therefore no prior experience in hacking or developing mobile apps is required. Whether you want to learn how to pentest mobile apps, you are an app developer that fancies to secure his/her apps, or just curios, our workshop is a jumpstart to your goal.

TROOPERS19 Training Teaser: Insight Into Windows Internals

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

in-depth studies of undocumented, or poorly documented, system functionalities;
development of performant and compatible software to monitor or extend the activities of the operating system itself; and
analysis of security-related issues, such as persistent malware.

The “Insight into Windows Internals” training offered at TROOPERS’19 delivers knowledge on the core components and inner working principles of Windows 10. For example, the training provides knowledge on how Windows 10 uses virtualization to isolate security-critical functionalities from attackers that have managed to compromise the system. The training includes a variety of practical exercises allowing attendees to observe first-hand the operation of Windows 10.

TROOPERS19 Training Teaser: Hacking 101

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hi there,
like in recent years the popular Hacking 101 workshop will take place on TROOPERS19, too! The workshop will give you an insight into the hacking techniques required for penetration testing. These techniques will cover various topics:

Information gathering
Network scanning
Web application hacking
Low-level exploitation

…and more!

TROOPERS19 Training Teaser: Windows & Linux Binary Exploitation

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Once again Troopers will have its Windows & Linux Binary Exploitation workshop. Its main focus are the ever-present stack-based buffer overflows still found in software today (e.g. CVE-2018-5002, CVE-2018-1459, and CVE-2018-12897) and their differences with regard to exploitation on Windows and Linux systems. If you ever wanted to know the details of the exploit development process for these systems then this workshop is for you.

After initial exercises involving the exploitation of classic stack-based buffer overflows, modern defense mechanism such as Stack Cookies, DEP, and ASLR are presented and analyzed for weaknesses. The participants will learn how these defense mechanisms can be bypassed and will develop exploits targeting real world applications such as the Foxit Reader Plugin for Firefox, Wireshark, and nginx.

TROOPERS19 Training Teaser: Hardening Microsoft Environments

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“Credential Theft” or “Credential Reuse” attack techniques are the biggest known threats to Active Directory environments. This can be attributed to significant advances in and broad distribution of attack and reconnaissance tools such as mimikatz or Bloodhound. This means that after the first system in an environment is compromised it often takes less than 48 hours for a complete compromise of an Active Directory but unfortunately typically 8 to 9 months until the attack is discovered.

Secure CI/CD Pipelines @Troopers ’19

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the last couple of months we participated in an increasing count of customer projects following current trends of agile software development approaches and corresponding toolstacks. Especially the terms Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery kept (and still keep) popping up on every corner. The frameworks and processes behind those two hypes aid developing software at higher quality in shorter release cycles. This is especially relevant since end consumers nowadays expect fast releases including the newest features. If companies neglect this demand, competitors might take advantage of their better time-to-market which might result in increased market share and -dominance. A lot of changes are happening in the space of CI/CD. Existing tools become more mature, gaining increased attention, and new ones are appearing every month including better ways of integrating them into existing or new processes. Companies benefit from more choices, increased flexibility, and faster integration into existing company policies.

Blackhoodie at TROOPERS19

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We are going to have a Blackhoodie event at Troopers 2019 on March 18th and 19th in Heidelberg. With a very exciting event last year, we have decided to roll it once again during Troopers.

As always, one of the main motivation for Blackhoodie is bringing more women into reversing and other core security topics. So we would like to see more women apply to the training slots. However, if you are not a women and still feel really excited about Blackhoodie, you are welcome to apply. We do have a very limited number of seats at this training site. So we apologize in advance if we can’t accommodate everyone, even though we wish we could! Please apply before “February 10th” and we will contact you regarding next steps.

Catching fire with Docker, DevOps & Security in Enterprise Environments

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Docker has become the go-to technology in enterprise- and DevOps contexts. Yet, before mastering a skill, there is the thumb rule: one must learn the basics to have solid fundament before building a house on top.

Simon and I start from the very beginning. We introduce you to the fundamental concepts of containers starting at process isolation and extending our tour to the whole ecosystem of Docker and further associated technologies. We will cover Docker, microservices, containers, DevOps, continuous integration/deployment/delivery – all those fancy buzzwords that can be read in the context of modern software development methodologies.

And Five Talks More Were Accepted at TROOPERS19!

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

And five talks more were chosen for TROOPERS19! It sounds like it is going to be the best year ever again…

Follow us on Twitter (@WEareTROOPERS) for more information and do not hesitate to use our hashtag #TR19 when you have questions or remarks about TROOPERS19!

Your TROOPERS Team

——————————–

Not A Security Boundary: Breaking Forest Trusts by Will Schroeder, Lee Christensen

Presenting at the Active Directory Security Track

Abstract:

First Talks of TROOPERS19 Accepted!

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

TROOPERS18 was the best year ever (did you check our archives?) and it will be challenging to do better… However, we accept the challenge!

The trainings and talks were from high quality and choices were difficult to make… We hope you will enjoy reading these little teasers!

Follow us on Twitter (@WEareTROOPERS) for more information and do not hesitate to use our hashtag #TR19 when you have questions or remarks about TROOPERS19!

TROOPERS18 Photos online!

Thu, 03 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are very excited to publish some (more to come!) of our photos from TROOPERS18! Based on feedback from #TR18 we would also like to take a moment for our official TROOPERS photographer to introduce himself and tell you a little about what inspires him.

Peter Walter is a 37 year old photographer based in Germany near Stuttgart. For many years now he is the official TROOPERS photographer and very proud to be part of the Troopers family.

#TR18 Attack & Research Summaries

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS18 Attack & Research Track.

Reverse Engineering Blackbox Systems with GreatFET & Facedancer by Kate Temkin and Dominic Spill

USB is everywhere, your phone, gaming consoles, IoT waffle irons, you name it. Due to its’ widespread use in everyday life it is typically trusted by the user. And even if one wanted to find out what’s happening behind the scenes, surely digging into USB communication is too much of a chore to be worth the hassle, right? This talk by Kate Temkin and Dominic Spill are about to prove that very wrong with an impressive display of their tools GreatFET and Facedancer.

#TR18 Defense & Management Summaries

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS18 Defense & Management Track.

All Your Cloud Are Belong to Us

The talk “All Your Cloud Belong Are Belong to Us” was held by Nate Warfield, who is a Senior Security Program Manager for the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).
Before Microsoft he worked as a network engineer about 18 years and 10 of this for a large amount of cell phone companies.
Nate gives an overview about the state of the cloud solution provided by Microsoft, Azure, and how he hunts vulnerabilities in this environment.
Finally he concludes that the giving up your infrastructure to the cloud doesn’t mean that you give up your responsibility.

#TR18 Next Generation Internet (NGI) Summaries

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS18 Next Generation Internet Event.

NGI Keynote by Graeme Neilson

Before his infosec career Graeme was a street performer, then security researcher, now he calls himself a defender. The talk was built around the following sentence: “The infosec industry and community have completely failed to create meaningful change in the behavior of people”.

The following example is a resume of how hacking worked from 1988 to 2017:

#TR18 SAP Security Summaries

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS18 SAP Security Track.

SAP IGS : The ‘vulnerable’ forgotten component by Yvan Genuer

The Internet Graphics Server (IGS) is used to generate Web Based graphics from the SAP Web AS. Yvan Genuer looked at the security of an ancient component with very few public vulnerabilities available so far. In his talk he gave us insights on the structure of the IGS, its services, and problems he had when looking for documentation of the IGS and its components.

#TR18 Active Directory Security Track, Part 1

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post discussing talks of the Active Directory Security Track of this year’s Troopers which took place last week in Heidelberg (like in the last nine years ;-). It featured, amongst others, a new track focused on Microsoft AD and its security properties & implications. This was the agenda.

The idea for this special track was born out of two considerations:

we had noted there’s a lot of stuff going on in the space, both on the offense and on the defense side. And in pretty much every incident analysis & response project we were brought in recently Active Directory played a huge role…
already in the early phase of the CfP several interesting submissions came in (maybe due to the fact that some big guns of the field had voiced very kind words in the past)… and creating an extra track simply relieved us from the burden to make a tough choice between those.

As this was the first Troopers since its creation where I didn’t have any official roles and out of personal interest (in a very distant past I happened to be the co-author of the first German book on Windows NT4 Security) I decided to spend the majority of conference day 2 in the AD track. In hindsight I’m tempted to say that the track was a huge success: brilliant talks, pretty much always a packed room, and quite good discussions after the talks. (yes, of course I’m biased, what makes you think that?).

Squirrelmail Full Disclosure – TROOPERS18

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Birk an me basically fully disclosed a 0day in Squirrelmail yesterday. This is a short Q&A to answer the most common questions about the issue to calm you all down a little bit. 😉

What is the punchline, what do I need to know?

An attacker able to exploit this vulnerability can extract files of the server the application is running on. This may include configuration files, log files and additionally all files that are readable for all users on the system. This issue is post-authentication. That means an attacker would need valid credentials for the application to log in or needs to exploit an additional vulnerability of which we are not aware of at this point of time.

The Hackers‘ Sanctuary City

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://youtu.be/wCMwTUS3k4c

TROOPERS has a long history of theming the conference every year. Usually we pick a surreal topic, a fun story which we think is worth to pick up on. Some of it starts as a crazy thought, others have been the result of long discussions. Most of them are online, only our master piece from 2016 is securely stored in the company’s vaults.

However, this year was different. Traveling across the globe, speaking at and attending other conferences, connecting with our peers and the community, we felt that 2017 was a particularly tough year for many of us, both professionally and personally. There was this doom and gloom baseline to it.

TelcoSecDay 2018 – Talks Part2

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We have the next set of selected talks being announced here. I am super excited about the variety of applications we had this year. Here are some of the talks we will have.

Title: From LoRa technology to deployment within Orange affiliates

Speakers: Franck L’Hereec and Albert Nguyen

Just deployed, the LoRa technology has already passed into the hands of hackers who have analyzed the LoRaWAN protocol as well as the objects and gateways that implement it. At Orange, Orange Labs’ security experts have therefore looked into those issues, first to understand it better, and also ensure the network’s deployment in optimal security conditions. Demonstration via the example of the treatment of the security of an innovation project by Orange. During the presentation we will present :

TLS in the Enterprise: Is Heartbleed still a Problem?

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Our new workshop about TLS/SSL in the enterprise will be held for the 1st time at Troopers 2018. So I would like to take the opportunity and post a short teaser about stuff we will cover in this workshop.

TLS/SSL is a complicated topic especially in enterprise environments due to the fact, that

encrypted traffic should be inspected e.g. for malware
customers/users must be able to use important applications
crypto attacks are complex and sometimes considered to be only a problem in theory
the internal CERT wants to have every issue fixed, if feasible or not 😉
impact of configuration changes can not be foreseen
Software inventory is incomplete (do you want to make a bet that Heartbleed is fixed completely in your environment ;-)? )
… and so forth

In the workshop we will cover all these points, discuss them and share our experience regarding feasibility and useful mitigating controls. We will explain the most common SSL vulnerabilities/attacks, demonstrate tools to test (and sometimes to exploit) them, point out pitfalls and recommend what to do. Let us have a look at one example, Heartbleed:

Extracting data from an EMV (Chip-And-Pin) Card with NFC technology

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest blog post by Salvador Mendoza.

During years, many different researches and attacks against digital and physical payment methods have been discussed. New security techniques and methodologies such as tokenization process attempts to reduce or prevent fraudulent transactions.

Extracting or capturing data from a transaction have been studied in different ways, and some of the most common techniques are skimming, wireless skimming, relay attacks, traffic sniffing or modifying a PoS(Point of Sale) system. In our talk, “NFC Payments: The Art of Relay & Replay Attacks” at TROOPERS18, we will discuss a new technique and methodology that malicious individuals could implement to extract data.

Get your hands dirty playing with RFID/NFC

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest blog post by Nahuel Grisolia.

The first time I’ve heard about RFID was at high school, back in 2002, when I was studying Electronics. Back in that time, this technology was like some sort of black magic to me. A few years later in 2011, our government in Argentina decided to implement a “new technology” called NFC, designed as the new and only way of payment for the use of public transport. So, I decided to understand it better, play with it, and try some hacks I heard from the cool people of the CCC.

Blackhoodie at TROOPERS18

Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to announce the Blackhoodie event at Troopers 2018 on March 12th and 13th in Heidelberg. This time it is going to be a 2 day workshop with various interesting topics related to reverse engineering. We will make sure that you get some hands on experience with reversing and more.

As always, one of the main motivation for Blackhoodie is bringing more women into reversing.
So we would like to see more women apply to the training slots. However, we are open to everyone who would like to apply. We do have a very limited number of seats at this training site. So we apologize in advance if we can’t accommodate everyone, even though we wish we could! Please apply before “February 20th” and we will contact you regarding next steps.

Virtualized Training Environment with Ansible

Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As Kai and I will be holding a TROOPERS workshop on automation with ansible, we needed a setup for the attendees to use ansible against virtual machines we set up with the necessary environment. The idea was, that every attendee has their own VMs to run ansible against, ideally including one to run ansible from, as we want to avoid setup or version incompatibilities if they set up their own ansible environment on their laptop. Also they should only be able to talk to their own machines, thus avoiding conflicts because of accidental usage of wrong IPs or host names but also simplify the setup for the users.

#TR18 Active Directory Security Track

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A happy new year to everybody!

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.

Announcing the first 5 talks of TROOPERS18!!!!

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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”!

TROOPERS for Students!

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Some Quick Tips for Submitting a Talk to Black Hat or TROOPERS

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Given the CfP for Black Hat US in Vegas ends in a few days – and as apparently some people have already started to think about their TR18 submissions – I’ll quickly provide some loose recommendations on how to write a submission here. There’s quite some reasonable advice out there already (the BH CfP site lists this and this which you should both read as well) but some of you might find it useful to get (yet) another perspective.

Troopers17 GSM Network – How about your own SMPP Service?

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The event of the events is getting closer and again, we are very optimistic to have a lot of awesome trainings, talks, evening events, and discussions. But we again will also have some “features” and gimmicks for those of you who would like to play with new, old, or just interesting technologies. As you might remember, since some years one of these features is and again will be our own GSM Network. As we are improving our setup from year to year, this time we’d like to give you the chance to actively participate with ideas and your own services.

TR17 Training: Hacking 101

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Hi there,
Like in recent years the popular Hacking 101 workshop will take place on TROOPERS17, too! The workshop will give attendees an insight into the hacking techniques required for penetration testing. These techniques will cover various topics:

information gathering
network scanning
web application hacking
low-level exploitation

…and more!

During this workshop you will learn, step by step, a testing methodology that is applicable to the majority of scenarios. So imagine you have to assess the security of a system running on the Internet. How would you start? First, you need a good understanding about the target, including running services or related systems. Just scanning an IP will most likely not reveal a lot of information about the system. The gathered information may help you to identify communication relations of services that could include vulnerabilities. A brief understanding of the target and it’s related systems/services/applications will make scanning and identifying vulnerabilities a lot easier and more effective. Then, the last step will be the exploitation of the identified vulnerabilities, with the ultimate aim to get access to the target system and pivot to other, probably internal, systems and resources.

First dedicated Forensic Computing Training at TR17

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I am looking forward to our newly introduced dedicated Forensic Computing Training at TR17!
We will start the first day with a detailed background briefing about Forensic Computing as a Forensic Science, Digital Evidence, and the Chain of Custody. The rest of the workshop we will follow the Order of Volatility starting with the analysis of persistent storage using file system internals and carving, as well as RAID reassembly with lots of hands-on case studies using open source tools. As a next step, we will smell the smoking gun in live forensics exercises. Depending on your preferences we will then dig a bit into memory forensics and network forensics.

TelcoSecDay 2017 – 2nd Round of Talks

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Hello and a Happy new Year!

There are only two and a half months left, so I’d like to publish the next two talks for TelcoSecDay 2017, taking place at 21st of March in Heidelberg. Both talks are about the security of an upcoming technology which importance will raise in near future: 5G Networks.

One of the talks will be from an attacker’s point of view, highlighting weaknesses of 2G/3G/4G networks and what we have to fix in 5G, and the other one will give us insights into current developments of the 3GPP standardization group.

TR17 Training: Crypto attacks and defenses

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest blog written by Jean-Philippe Aumasson & Philipp Jovanovic about their upcoming TROOPERS17 training: Crypto attacks and defenses.

The 1-day training from last TROOPERS has become a 2-day training, featuring even more real-world attacks and defenses as well as new hands-on sessions! We’ll teach you, step by step, how to spot and exploit crypto vulnerabilities, how to use the strongest forms of state-of-the-art cryptography to secure modern systems (like IoT or mobile applications), and bring you up to speed on the latest and greatest developments in the world of cryptography, such as TLS 1.3, blockchains, and post-quantum crypto.

3rd Round of TROOPERS17 Talks

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We had to make some tough choices regarding our TROOPERS17 Main Conference Agenda. Thank you again to everyone for submitting! The full agenda will be published later this week, but for now here are the next round of talks!

Ivan Pepelnjak: Securing Network Automation
If you have operational experience in running large networks then you’re probably yearning to replace the traditional way of managing individual network devices via SSH with something better and more reliable. Software Defined Networking (SDN) was touted as the all-encompassing solution, but what we got instead is a heap of academic ideas, several platforms that require as much investment as an SAP deployment, and a bunch of proprietary products focused more on increasing lock-in and vendor revenue than solving operational problems.

PoC Con Seoul 2016

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I had the pleasure to join the PowerOfCommunity conference in Seoul. Florian and Felix attended the conference in the past and enjoyed it a lot, so I took the opportunity to join this year. From what I had heard the conference is highly technical, offensive security and community focused (surprise 😉 ). Boy did they deliver!
Located in a hotel next to a nice park and close to the famous Gangnam district in Seoul we came together to feel the power of community. The conference was planned for two days and offered two tracks per day. Several key talks were presented for everyone.
I really liked the topics a lot. Some contributions I found particularly interesting were:
Petr Švenda with “The Million-Key Question – How RSA Public Key Leaks Its Origin”, where he presented his research of fingerprinting RSA public keys. By analyzing the RSA keys from smartcards and software sources he was able to find similarities between them, which allowed fingerprinting the generating source for some cases. With this information it could be possible gather some potentially important details from simple keys. He is currently expanding his work, please send him an E-Mail if you have RSA keys from an exotic resource. 😉

TR17 Training: Fuzzing with American Fuzzy Lop, Address Sanitizer and LibFuzzer

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest blog written by Hanno Böck who will be running the Fuzzing with American Fuzzy Lop, Address Sanitizer and LibFuzzer at TROOPERS17.

Fuzzing is a very old technique to find bugs and vulnerabilities in software. However it has seen a new push in recent years due to vastly improved tools. The compilers gcc and clang have received Sanitizer tools that allow finding a lot of bugs like use after free errors and out of bounds reads that are otherwise very hard to find.

2nd Rounds of TROOPERS17 Talks!

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It is the end of the year and we are hoping it is not too hectic of a time for you all! But if it is, hopefully the announcement of our next round of TROOPERS17 talks is enough to get you in the TROOPERS (if not the holiday) spirit 🙂

Francis Alexander & Bharadwaj Machiraju: How we hacked Distributed Configuration Management Systems

With increase in necessity of distributed applications, coordination and configuration management tools for these classes of applications have popped up. These systems might pop-up occasionally during penetration tests. The major focus of this research was to find ways to abuse these systems as well as use them for getting deeper access to other systems.

TelcoSecDay 2017 – First Talks Published

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Even if the CFP for TelcoSecDay 2017 is officially closed, I am still getting mails in. First of all: thank you for all your great feedback! As the TelcoSecDay is a complimentary and non-public event with highly specialized topics, it only works by sharing knowledge with each other. But please keep in mind that the speaker-slots are limited and I have to make a decision at some point of time.
Anyhow, I am looking forward for a great event and I am proud to publish the first accepted talks:

Announcing the first 5 talks of TROOPERS17!!!!

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

TROOPERS16 was packed with epic talks from around the world, an unknown evil twin brother appearing, hands-on trainings, and a legendary year for our TROOPERS Charity efforts! If you were there you might be wondering to yourself how could they possibly top it? Well, I am going to let you in on a little secret: Next year is the 10th edition of TROOPERS. One DECADE of TROOPERS, and we are pulling out all the stops! Starting with the announcement of the first 5 talks!

TelcoSecDay 2017 – CFP Opens

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

For the 6th year in a row, the next TelcoSecDay will take place in 2017 on March 21th. Again, it will be held one day before Troopers IT-Security Conference as an invitation-only event. For those of you who don’t know the TSD, it is organized by ERNW and is aimed at bringing researchers and people from the telecommunication industry together to discuss about current security weaknesses, challenges and strategies. To do so, various topics will be presented during the talks and there will surely be enough time to follow-up in extensive discussions.
To give you an idea, here’s the TSD 2016 agenda, and here’s the one of 2015.

Because of Cyber – A Recap

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Troopers16 has been over for quite a while now, but because sharing is caring, we would like to give you some more insight and share some gems that happened over the 2 days of us running a small/medium sized enterprise in mid-west Russia as part of the well received FishBowl side story.

Technology wise the whole infrastructure of FishBowl, as well as the Cyber Emergency Response Team, was hosted on one FreeBSD machine with exception of the challenge scoreboard which was on site only, hence conference network only.
The C.E.R.T. web site was static web site using the jekyll engine. FishBowl on the other hand required some dynamic web magic which is why we choose to use the flask framework. For the FishBowl web design we simply helped ourselves with the styles of the Troopers web site, who of you noticed? 😉
All web related stuff was reverse proxied by an nginx to provide a common layer of technology even though every venture was segregated into its own FreeBSD jail environment.
For mail a simple postfix setup was set up. Having a proper mail server for such »shenanigans« turned out to be very enjoyable, but more on that later.

SAP Security @ Troopers16

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to SAP, Troopers has two events that are about Security in SAP Systems in particular. On the first day of the Troopers16 Trainings the BIZEC workshop takes place. The second event is a dedicated SAP track during the conference. Apart from these events there were of course a lot of nice folks to talk to (about SAP) 🙂 This post is a short overview about SAP security @ TROOPERS16.

Defense & Management Day 2

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

TROOPERS16 offered many different speakers from around the globe. Below are three different talks from the afternoon of Day 2’s Defense and Management Track.

===

The TROOPERS16 talk “Attacking & Protecting Big Data Environments” presented the research of Birk Kauer and Matthias Luft, (ERNW) in which they showed how enterprise-grade “big data” environments, based on e.g. HortonWorks or Cloudera, comprising of components such as HDFS, Yarn, Hue, Flume, Hive, Spark, Sentry/Ranger could be attacked. These environments typically process huge amounts of data. The data is either stored in a cluster file system or streamed into clusters. The processing of these datasets are done by jobs, and these jobs can be arbitrary code execution.

TSD 2016 – Follow Up

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks again for all the great talks and fruitful discussions @TSD 2016! I hope everybody had a safe trip home and enjoyed Troopers as we did. In the meantime I contacted all speakers to talk about publication of their slidesets. Some of them agreed (or already published them on their own) so I’d like to share these with you:

Alexandre De Oliveira – Assaulting IPX Diameter roaming network
Siddharth Rao – The known unknowns of SS7 and beyond.
Joao Collier de Mendonca – “rucki zucki” scanning tool
Harald Welte – Open Source Network Elements for Security Analysis of Mobile Networks
Ravi & Altaf Shaik – Don’t connect to my 4G base station: investigating info leaks in 4G basebands

Unpatchable – Living with a vulnerable implanted device

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: Marie Moe talked about security issues of medical devices, especially implantable devices like pacemakers, but not in overwhelming technological depth. She wanted to point out the necessity of intensified security research in the field of medical devices as vendors and medical personnel seem to be lacking necessary awareness of security of devices, interfaces, services, and even data privacy.”Get involved, join the cavalry” was her core message.

Lub-Dub-Lub-Dub-Lub-Dub
Marie started her talk with the sound of a repeating heartbeat. First she introduced how she came up with the topic of her talk: Marie relies on a pacemaker herself andsince she got it implanted she was curious how secure this little device might be. A minimum education of the auditorium followed including an explanation how a human heart works and what a pacemaker does.

Security Assessment of Microsoft DirectAccess

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A talk about DirectAccess (an IPv6-only VPN solution) was given by our colleague Ali Hardudi during IPv6 summit. Ali has recently finished his master thesis on this topic.

The DirectAccess VPN technology was introduced by Microsoft starting from Windows server 2008. It allows users remotely, seamlessly and securely connect to their internal network resources without a need to provide user credentials, which is done using different technologies such as Windows domain group policies.

Anonymization IPv6 in PCAPs – Challenges and Wins

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Jasper Bongertz is a Senior Technical Consultant at Airbus Defence and Space CyberSecurity. He is focusing on IT security, Incident Response and Network Forensics.
During the IPv6 summit on Troopers16 he had given a talk on anonymization IPv6 in PCAPs and presented his new tool.

Sometimes you need to share your packet capture files (PCAPs), but distributing them involves a risk of exposing the confidential information. To avoid this, you must sanitize your PCAPs. The goal of sanitization is to remove the critical details but keep enough information for the PCAP to still be useful. The original-to-sanitized ratio is based on your goals.

Passive Intelligence Gathering and Analytics – It’s all Just Metadata!

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The first talk after the keynote on day 2 of TROOPERS was from Christopher Truncer about passive intelligence gathering and the analytics of that. Christopher Truncer (@ChrisTruncer) is a red teamer with Mandiant. He is a co-founder and current developer of the Veil-Framework, a project aimed to bridge the gap between advanced red team and penetration testing toolsets.

His talk is mainly about defending a network from different threats by collecting and analyzing metadata from different sources.

The Kings in your Castle

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

At the second day of the TROOPERS16 conference an interesting talk about Advanced Persistent Threats took place from Marion Marschalek and Raphaël Vinot. Marion Marschalek is a Security Researcher, focusing on the analysis of emerging threats and exploring novel methods of threat detection. Marion started her career within the anti-virus industry and also worked on advanced threat protection systems where she built a thorough understanding of how threats and protection systems work and how both occasionally fail.

Advanced IPv6 Network Reconnaissance

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Fernando Gont, who is specializing in the field of communications protocols security, gave a talk during this year’s Troopers IPv6 summit. He spoke about network reconnaissance techniques in IPv6 area and presented a brand new set of tools for this purpose.

Comparing with methods for IPv4, reconnaissance techniques for IPv6 should be different. It offers much larger address space, so such attacks as brute force address scanning are not feasible anymore, because it would take too much time to send one packet to each and every possible address. Fernando has also noted that in general network reconnaissance support in security tools has traditionally been poor. Together these facts prompt that it’s time for something new, and recently a new IETF RFC 7707 was published.

Patch Me If You Can

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Right after the Opening Keynote of TROOPERS16, an informative and interesting talk took place at the SAP Security track. This talk was given by three speakers; Damian Poddebniak who is currently a master student at the University of Applied Sciences of Münster, Sebastian Schinzel who works as an IT security Professor at the University of Applied Sciences of Münster and he is also the founder of CycleSEC GmbH and finally the sixth-time speaker at Troopers “Andreas Wiegenstein” who is the CTO of Virtual Forge GmbH and a professional SAP security consultant since 2003.

Tools for Troubleshooting and Monitoring IPv6 Networks

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Yet another interesting 180-minute workshop in IPv6 Security Summit of TROOPERS16, which aimed to introduce the IPv6 troubleshooting and monitoring tools, which are essentially needed by users in order to know how to deal with IPv6 in any IPv6-enabled network.

Before we dive into this post, let me introduce you in few words “Gabriel Müller” the speaker and the instructor of this workshop. Gabriel works as a senior consultant at AWK Group by mainly assisting clients in the public and private sectors as a project manager and an expert in the network area.

Caring for file formats

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ange Albertini is a reverse engineer and author of Corkami.

First and foremost he explained what a polyglot file is. A polyglot is a special file that has more than one type in the same file. For example, Ange Albertini demonstrated a polyglot which is a pdf, a pdf reader, a java executable and an html file inside of one file. The second polyglot he demonstrated was a file which had the characteristics that when you encrypted it with AES you get a PNG image and if it´s encrypted with another key you will get a flash video and when you encrypted it with DES you get a PDF document. He pointed out that a file format is not just a sequence of byte it´s rather a computer dialect to communicate between communities. He also highlighted that people don’t really care about what is behind the file format they only what to use it and communicate with other people.

Imma Chargin Mah Lazer-How to protect against (D)DoS attacks

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aim to make services and systems unavailable to legitimate users . If these attacks are performed by multiple sources at the same time and for the same target, they are called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This talk “Imma Chargin Mah Lazer” describes different types of (D)DoS attacks that are out in the wild and are seen on a daily basis by different corporations. Furthermore, a multi-layered strategy to mitigate such kinds of attacks has been presented within the talk. The speaker is Dr. Oliver Matula, an IT security researcher at ERNW who holds a PHD degree in physics. He presented the topic in a simple way which eases the delivery of information to audience of different technical levels and backgrounds.

QNX: 99 Problems but a Microkernel ain’t one!

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The talk “QNX: 99 Problems but a Microkernel ain’t one!” was part of the Troopers conference in Heidelberg, 16 March 2016. The talk was done by the researchers Alex Plaskett and Georgi Geshev from the MWR Labs. The MWR Labs is the research department of the cyber security consultancy MWR InfoSecurity located in the UK.

The talk provided an overview of the research on the architecture and security systems of the QNX kernel with focus on the Blackberry 10 operating system. The talk was divided into two parts. First Alex Plaskett gave an introduction regarding the general structure of the QNX operation system and introduced the main subsystems. Second Georgi Geshev presented tools and approaches to abuse vulnerabilities in the QNX system.

The road to secure Smart Cars: ENISA approach

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

At TROOPERS16, Dr. Cédric LÉVY-BENCHETON an expert in cyber security at ENISA, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security. Dr. Cédric LÉVY-BENCHETON holds a presentation about cyber security of IoT (Internet of Things) and smart cars he presents the current threats in IoT and Smart cars. ENISA is an agency of the European Union. ENISA assists the Commission, the Member States and, the business community in meeting the requirements of network and information security.

unrubby: reversing without reversing

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The talk “unrubby: reversing without reversing” was part of the Troopers conference in Heidelberg, 16 March 2016. The talk was done by Richo Healey, who is currently working on the security engineering team at the Irish payment company Stripe. Richo Healey is an experienced conference speaker. Amongst other he has spoken at Kiwicon, DEF CON and 44con.

In his talk Richo Healey spoke about reverse engineering of Ruby software. First he talked about existing tools and techniques to regenerate source code from Ruby bytecode. Then he presented a new concept, which is implemented in his tool “unrubby”.

BMC BladeLogic: CVE-2016-1542 and CVE-2016-1543