2011 BASC Presentations

We would like to thank our speakers for donating their time and effort to help make this conference successful.

Binary instrumentation is a tool for understanding the dynamic behavior of programs by observing its execution with injected code. Security researchers use binary instrumentation tools to understand program and malware behavior. Taint analysis is one example. so the talk would be about the capabilities of pin and I will connect it to security/privacy related ideas. The talk would be interesting to people interested in analyzing behavior of applications and developing their own tools.

MozSecWorld is a web security reference site. It can teach you simple ways that you can make your own websites more secure. You'll learn through diagrams, explanations, and best of all, live demos! :) If you are a web developer, you might find the open-source code for each demo helpful too.

This presentation will feature the recently unveiled, official OWASP Mobile Top 10 Risks. As many agree that mobile application security is in its infancy, this list is intended to help developers and organizations prioritize their security efforts throughout the development life cycle. Many of the same mistakes made over the past decade in other areas of application security have managed to resurface in the mobile world. There have also been many new security challenges introduced by mobile applications and platforms. Through the OWASP Mobile Security Project, the primary goal is to enhance the visibility of mobile security risks just as OWASP has successfully done for the web.

As the attack surface and threat landscape for mobile applications continues to rapidly evolve, arming developers with the tools they need to succeed is essential. Each environment presents very unique and different risks to consider. Our research and findings will be presented from a platform agnostic perspective.

Client-side development with JavaScript has grown significantly thanks to Ajax, the plethora of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, and powerful JavaScript engines such as Google's V8. With the rapid push for HTML5 and the emergence of Node.js, JavaScript has become paramount. However, we are starting to move away from the same-domain policy. Currently, the XMLHttpRequest object in the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox now supports cross-domain communications to a degree. HTML5 has also introduced a number of features including WebWorkers, cross-document messaging, and WebSockets that are JavaScript-heavy and have raised a number of security issues. This presentation will also delve into the best practices of rendering and parsing JSON, the security woes surrounding WebGL, and the state of creating and running a Node.js web server

Data breaches through Web application vulnerabilities have become particularly rampant. Point solutions -- for example, a Web Application Firewall that scans requests destined to the Web app -- can only stop a limited number of attack patterns, and do not provide any protection from a breach once a vulnerability is eventually exploited. We have been researching a complementary approach to prevent breaches, based on the idea that if sensitive data is tracked closely enough, an organization can prevent breaches without worrying about Web application vulnerabilities that lead to breaches.

We have designed a system, Pedigree, that associates tamper-proof tags with database records and files, and uses an OS-level module to track the flow of tagged data through the various components of a Web application. Pedigree also tags network data, ensuring that a simple firewall or switch can identify the provenance of a flow using the tag on its packets. Thus, the firewall can choose to permit a flow that is a response for an authorized Webapp user request to pass through it, while denying flows that are unauthorized and likely correspond to malicious exfiltration requests (e.g., an SQL injection).

In this talk, I will present the architecture of Pedigree and describe how Pedigree might be integrated with existing Web application frameworks and firewalls.

Information gathering is not only the first step, but perhaps the most important repeated process within penetration testing. How well a tester is capable of learning the characteristics and nuances of an application can make all the difference in comprehensive testing and sophisticated attacks. Information gathering is far more than merely mapping an application.

This talk focuses on common pitfalls and misconceptions of information gathering, and how we can approach it better. Using strategies from reverse engineering and forensics, we will learn the skills and tools needed to find evidence, grok what it means, so that we can ensure ensure consistent & comprehensive understandings of how a site works. Specific things that will be covered include: Anti-patterns, learning behaviors of an application, reading exceptions between the lines, finger printing a website beyond HTTP headers, creating a working API for scripted attacking, and content discovery beyond throwing massive wordlists at the wall.

Tools which support these tasks, and counter measures that make this more challenging will be discussed throughout the talk.

Ever wanted to know more about how static binary analysis works? It's complicated. Ever want to know how C++ language elements are automatically transformed? The high-level overview of how machines analyze code for security flaws is just the beginning. In this talk we'll be delving into the gritty details of the modeling process.

With the ever increasing market for smart phones, application developers and consumers are making a mad dash for the mobile application architecture. Much like the race to the web many are ignoring the security lessons previously learned and are creating a new avenue of attack which puts individuals as well as organizations at risk. Focusing on the two major players in this space, Apple iOS and Google Android, this talk will focus on the types of issues common to mobile apps and will provide advice for both smart phone owners as well as application developers on how they can protect the data which is being entrusted to these devices.

Theoretically, the security industry knows that mobile phones are an exposed attack surface. Practically, there has been very little attention paid to the subject. As an introduction, the resources that a mobile phone can provide to a hacker will be explained. These include persistent internet connections (providing an entry point to any physically near network) and a low profile(which assists in evading both physical security). Next, discussion will focus on the construction of the proof of concept: using chroot jails with qemu files compiled for the ARM processor architecture. With the proof of concept model in hand, the presentation will include discussion of practical threat modeling demonstrating the usage of the above benefits. Threats discussed in depth: -a targeted cyber attack/penetration test, leveraging a mobile phone as an entry point -using the phone as part of a less focused campaign to compromise poorly protected personal resources such as laptops or other mobile phones in coffeeshops. To conclude, focus will be placed on further work. Potential opportunities for further research include packaging the qemu files necessary to run an emulated Linux environment as a payload.

Web application firewalls (WAFs) are an additional security layer that can help protect against 'some' common attacks as from the OWASP top ten security risks list. By customizing the rules to your applications, many attacks can be identified and thwarted. However, this requires significant effort with testing and maintaining application change control. Participants will come away with the basics of web application firewalls, differences, best practices and learn some common characteristics of using them.