Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2005 [Video] Presentations from the security conference

Philip R. Zimmermann is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy. For that, he was the target of a three-year criminal investigation, because the government held that US export restrictions for cryptographic software were violated when PGP spread all around the world following its 1991 publication as freeware. Despite the lack of funding, the lack of any paid staff, the lack of a company to stand behind it, and despite government persecution, PGP nonetheless became the most widely used email encryption software in the world.

Phil has been working on a new project and plans to have freeware ready for all Black Hat attendees.

AV software is becoming extremely popular because of the its percieved protection. Even the average person is aware they want AV on their computer (see AOL, Netscape, Netzero, Earthlink, and other ISP television ads). What if: Instead of protecting ppl from hackers AV software was actually making it easier for hackers?

This talk will outline general binary auditing techniques using AV software as an example, and demonstrate examples of remote AV vulnerabilities discovered using those techniques.

Alex Wheeler is a security researcher, who specializes in reversing engineering binaries for security vulnerabilities. His research experience was cultivated during his time with ISS X-Force, which he spent auditing critical network applications and technologies for security vulnerabilities. Alex's recent audit focus on AV products has lead to the discovery of serious systemic and point vulnerabilities in many major AV products.

Neel Mehta works as an application vulnerability researcher at ISS X-Force, and like many other security researchers comes from a reverse-engineering background. His reverse engineering experience was cultivated through extensive consulting work in the copy protection field, and has more recently been focused on application security. Neel has done extensive research into binary and source-code auditing, and has applied this knowledge to find many vulnerabilities in critical and widely deployed network applications.

This talk will present recent advances in the design of robust cryptographic backdoors in secret symmetric ciphers (i.e., classified or proprietary ciphers). The problem directly affects end-users since corporations and governments have in the past produced secret symmetric ciphers for general use (e.g., RC4 and Skipjack, respectively).

The problem itself is challenging since it involves leaking secret key material in the ciphertexts that are produced by a deterministic function, whereas traditional subliminal channels have relied on the use of randomized cryptographic algorithms. Such attacks can be regarded as advanced Trojan horse attacks since the secret block cipher securely and subliminally transmits the symmetric key of the sender and receiver to the malicious designer and confidentiality holds even when the cipher is made public. The material that will be surveyed was published in Fast Software Encryption (FSE '98), the Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ACISP '03), and Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC '04).

Adam Young received his BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Yale University in '94, his MS degree in Computer Science from Columbia University in '96. He was awarded his PhD degree in Computer Science with distinction from Columbia University in '02. He has authored publications in IEEE Foundations of Computer Science, Crypto, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, Security in Communication Networks (SCN), Fast Software Encryption, Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (ANTS), PKC, CT-RSA, SAC, IEEE Security and Privacy, Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES), ACISP, and the IEEE Information Assurance Workshop.

He is the author of the book "Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology" that is co-authored with Dr. Moti Yung. Adam has given invited talks at Xerox PARC, MITRE, Bell Labs, NYU, Sandia National Labs, the Naval Postgraduate School, the AMS-MMS special session on coding theory and cryptography, and the 2nd International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Homeland Security (ICATHS '04). In April Adam will be giving a talk at the DIMACS Workshop on Theft in E-Commerce that is being held at Rutgers University.

Adam's work experience includes serving as a cryptographic consultant for CertCo, Inc., performing research for Lucent as a Member of Technical Staff, acting as a Principal Engineer for Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications, and conducting Federally funded research for the DoD.

Paul Vixie has been contributing to Internet protocols and UNIX systems as a protocol designer and software architect since 1980. Early in his career, he developed and introduced sends, proxynet, rtty, cron and other lesser-known tools.

Today, Paul is considered the primary modern author and technical architect of BINDv8 the Berkeley Internet Name Domain Version 8, the open source reference implementation of the Domain Name System (DNS). He formed the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) in 1994, and now acts as Chairman of its Board of Directors. The ISC reflects Paul's commitment to developing and maintaining production quality open source reference implementations of core Internet protocols.

More recently, Paul cofounded MAPS LLC (Mail Abuse Prevention System), a California nonprofit company established in 1998 with the goal of hosting the RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) and stopping the Internet's email system from being abused by spammers. Vixie is currently the Chief Technology Officer of Metromedia Fiber Network Inc (MFNX.O).

Along with Frederick Avolio, Paul co-wrote "Sendmail: Theory and Practice" (Digital Press, 1995). He has authored or co-authored several RFCs, including a Best Current Practice document on "Classless IN-ADDR.ARPA Delegation" (BCP 20). He is also responsible for overseeing the operation of F.root-servers.net, one of the thirteen Internet root domain name servers.

Windows is the number one target on the Internet today. It takes less than 5 minutes for an unpatched Windows machine, connected to the Internet, to get owned. Yet the most prevalent security practices still consist of running anti-viruses and constant patching.

This presentation introduces a new tool, called Ozone, that is designed to protect against most of the commonly exploited attack vectors. To protect against the most common of these, buffer overflows, Ozone uses an address space randomization technique. In addition, Ozone runs all processes in a sandbox that severely limits what a compromised process is allowed to do. Finally, Ozone protects itself and the underlying operating system against further attacks.

Eugene Tsyrklevich has an extensive security background ranging from designing and implementing Host Intrusion Prevention Systems to training people in research, corporate, and military environments. Eugene has presented his research at a number of security conferences including Usenix Security, BlackHat Europe and BlackHat USA. Eugene holds both a Bachelor and a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego

After three years of community development, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is proud to introduce the next generation of web application security standards at BlackHat USA 2005. The Guide to Securing Web Applications and Services 2.0 is a major new release - written from the ground up, with many new sections covering common and emerging risks, including:

* How to design more secure software

* How to conduct a security review using the Guide

* How to perform the most difficult web application processes correctly: processing credit cards, interacting with payment gateways (such as PayPayl), and anti-phishing controls

* Reorganized and easily navigated chapters on web application controls including: web services, comprehensive authentication and authorization controls, session management, data validation, interpreter injection, and many new controls within existing chapters

* Secure configuration and deployment

* And software quality assurance.

The Guide has adopted and extended the popular OWASP Top 10 approach - security objectives, how to identify if you are at risk, with recommended remediations in three popular frameworks, and further reading. The Guide is platform neutral, and has examples in J2EE, ASP.NET and PHP. The Guide 2.0 is on the conference materials CD-ROM in its entirety. As it is free (as in beer as well as in freedom), you can redistribute or print it as often as you wish.

To demonstrate the incredible versatility of the Guide and its pragmatic approach, we will be conducting a live security review of software selected at random by the audience. To perform the review demonstration, we will be using just a few off-the-shelf web development tools with Firefox to demonstrate how easy it is to subvert the average application, and how simple it is to fix issues properly by using the Guide.

We expect this talk will be useful to all attendees, but those who set secure coding standards within their organization, manage risk from custom software, manage software development or are software architects or developers will benefit the most from attending this session.

Andrew van der Stock is among the many contributors to the OWASP project over the years. Andrew has presented at many conferences, including BlackHat USA, linux.conf.au, and AusCERT, and is a leading Australian web application researcher. He helps run the OWASP Melbourne chapter, started the OWASP Sydney chapter, and is ex-President of SAGE-AU, the System Administrator's Guild of Australia. You can read more about OWASP, the Open Web Application Security Project at http://www.owasp.org/ and you can read more about Andrew at http://www.greebo.net/.

When we built Metasploit, our focus was on the exploit development process. We tried to design a system that helped create reliable and robust exploits. While this is obviously very important, it's only the first step in the process. What do you do once you own EIP? Our presentation will concentrate on the recent advancements in shellcode, IDS/firewall evasion, and post-exploitation systems. We will discuss the design and implementation of the technologies that enable complex payloads, such as VNC injection, and the suite of tools we've built upon them. We will then present a glimps of the next generation of Metasploit, and how these new advances will serve as it's backbone.

Spoonm

Since late 2003, spoonm has been one of the core developers behind the Metasploit Project. He is responsible for much of the architecture in version 2.0, as well as other components including encoders, nop generators, and a polymorphic shellcode engine. A full-time student at a northern university, spoonm spends too much of his free time on security research projects.

Skape

Skape is a lead software developer by day and an independent security researcher by night. He joined forces with the Metasploit project in 2004 where his many contributions have included the Meterpreter, VNC injection, and many other payload advances. Skape has worked on a number of open-source projects and has authored several papers on security related technologies. His current security related interests include post-exploitation technologies, payload development and optimization, and exploitation prevention technology.

Web Services represent a new and unexplored set of security-sensitive technologies that have been widely deployed by large companies, governments, financial institutions, and in consumer applications. Unfortunately, the attributes that make web services attractive, such as their ease of use, platform independence, use of HTTP and powerful functionality, also make them a great target for attack.

In this talk, we will explain the basic technologies (such as XML, SOAP, and UDDI) upon which web services are built, and explore the innate security weaknesses in each. We will then demonstrate new attacks that exist in web service infrastructures, and show how classic web application attacks (SQL Injection, XSS, etc) can be retooled to work with the next-generation of enterprise applications.

The speakers will also demonstrate some of the first publicly available tools for finding and penetrating web service enabled systems.

Alex Stamos is a founding partner of iSEC Partners, LLC, a strategic digital security organization, with several years experience in security and information technology. Alex is an experienced security engineer and consultant specializing in application security and securing large infrastructures, and has taught many classes in network and application security.

Before he helped form iSEC Partners, Alex spent two years as a Managing Security Architect with @stake. Alex performed as a technical leader on many complex and difficult assignments, including a thorough penetration test and architectural review of a 6 million line enterprise management system, a secure re-design of a multi-thousand host ASP network, and a thorough analysis and code review of a major commercial web server. He was also one of @stake's West Coast trainers, educating select technical audiences in advanced network and application attacks.

Before @stake, Alex had operational security responsibility over 50 Fortune-500 web applications. He has also worked at a DoE National Laboratory. He holds a BSEE from the University of California, Berkeley, where he participated in research projects related to distributed secure storage and automatic C code auditing.

Scott Stender is a founding partner of iSEC Partners, LLC, a strategic digital security organization. Scott brings with him several years of experience in large-scale software development and security consulting. Prior to iSEC, Scott worked as an application security analyst with @stake where he led and delivered on many of @stake's highest priority clients.

Before @stake, Scott worked for Microsoft Corporation where he was responsible for security and reliability analysis for one of Microsoft's distributed enterprise applications. In this role, Scott drew on his technical expertise in platform internals, server infrastructure, and application security, combined with his understanding of effective software development processes to concurrently improve the reliability, performance, and security of a product running on millions of computers worldwide.

In his research, Scott focuses on secure software engineering methodology and security analysis of core technologies. Most recently, Scott was published in the January-February 2005 issue of "IEEE Security and Privacy", where he co-authored a paper entitled "Software Penetration Testing". He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

In September 2004, much hype was made of a buffer overflow vulnerability that existed in the Microsoft engine responsible for processing JPEG files. While the resulting vulnerability itself was nothing new, the fact that a vulnerability could be caused by a non-executable file commonly traversing public and private networks was reason for concern. File format vulnerabilities are emerging as more and more frequent attack vector. These attacks take advantage of the fact that an exploit can be carried within non-executable files that were previously considered to be innocuous. As a result, firewalls and border routers rarely prevent the files from entering a network when included as email attachments or downloaded from the Internet.

As with most vulnerabilities, discovering file format attacks tends to be more art than science. We will present various techniques that utilize file format fuzzing that range from pure brute force fuzzing to intelligent fuzzing that requires an understanding of the targeted file formats. We will present a methodology for approaching this type of research and address issues such as automating the process. Techniques will be discussed to address challenges such as attacking proprietary file formats, overcoming exception handling and reducing false positives. The presentation will include demonstrations of fuzzing tools designed for both the *nix and Windows platforms that will be released at the conference and the disclosure of vulnerabilities discovered during the course of our research.

Michael Sutton is a Director for iDEFENSE, a security intelligence company located in Reston, VA. He heads iDEFENSE Labs and the Vulnerability Aggregation Team (VAT). iDEFENSE Labs is the research and development arm of the company, which is responsible for discovering original security vulnerabilities in hardware and software implementations, while VAT focuses on researching publicly known vulnerabilities. His other responsibilities include developing tools and methodologies to further vulnerability research, and managing the iDEFENSE Vulnerability Contributor Program (VCP).

Prior to joining iDEFENSE, Michael established the Information Systems Assurance and Advisory Services (ISAAS) practice for Ernst and Young in Bermuda. He is a frequent presenter at information security conferences.

Michael obtained his Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) designation in 1998 and is a member of Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA). He has completed a Master of Science in Information Systems Technology degree at George Washington University, has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Alberta and is a Chartered Accountant. Outside of the office, he is a Sergeant with the Fairfax Volunteer Fire Department.

Adam Greene is a Security Engineer for iDEFENSE, a security intelligence company located in Reston, VA. His responsibilities at iDEFENSE include researching original vulnerabilities and developing exploit code as well as verifying and analyzing submissions to the iDEFENSE Vulnerability Contributor Program.

His interests in computer security lie mainly in reliable exploitation methods, fuzzing, and UNIX based system auditing and exploit development. In his time away from computers he has been known to enjoy tea and foosball with strange old women.

Last year at Black Hat, we introduced the rootkit FU. FU took an unprecented approach to hiding not previously seen before in a Windows rootkit. Rather than patching code or modifying function pointers in well known operating system structures like the system call table, FU demonstrated that is was possible to control the execution path indirectly by modifying private kernel objects in memory. This technique was coined DKOM, or Direct Kernel Object Manipulation. The difficulty in detecting this form of attack caused concern for anti-malware developers. This year, FU teams up with Shadow Walker to raise the bar for rootkit detectors once again. In this talk we will explore the idea of memory subversion. We demonstrate that is not only possible to hide a rootkit driver in memory, but that it is possible to do so with a minimal performance impact. The application (threat) of this attack extends beyond rootkits. As bug hunters turn toward kernel level exploits, we can extrapolate its application to worms and other forms of malware. Memory scanners beware the axiom, 'vidre est credere' . Let us just say that it does not hold the same way that it used to.

Sherri Sparks is a PhD student at the University of Central Florida. She received her undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering and subsequently switched to Computer Science after developing an interest in reverse code engineering and computer security. She also holds a graduate certificate in Computer Forensics. Currently, her research interests include offensive / defensive malicious code technologies and related issues in digital forensic applications.

Jamie Butler is the Director of Engineering at HBGary, Inc. specializing in rootkits and other subversive technologies. He is the co-author and a teacher of "Aspects of Offensive Rootkit Technologies" and co-author of the upcoming book "Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel" due out late July. Prior to accepting the position at HBGary, he was a senior developer on the Windows Host Sensor at Enterasys Networks, Inc. and a computer scientist at the NSA. He holds a MS in CS from UMBC and has published articles in the IEEE IA Workshop proceedings, Phrack, USENIX login, and Information Management and Computer Security. Over the past few years his focus has been on Windows servers concentrating in host based intrusion detection and prevention, buffer overflows, and reverse engineering. Jamie is also a contributor at rootkit.com.