AppSec Israel 2016 Presentations

Full descriptions of all the talks at AppSec Israel 2016 are below, together with each of the speakers' biographies.

The full schedule can be found and subscribed to here.

The AppSec Israel conference is proudly being sponsored by:

Bot Extension - Abusing Google Chrome Extensions for Bot Attacks
 Tomer Cohen, Head of R&D security, Wix.com 

Chrome extensions have opened a variety of opportunities for users as well as developers, expanding the limits of what we've known as browsing experience. Attacker have also spotted the wide usage of such extensions, and abuse people's trust in Chrome Web Store to distribute malicious extensions. This allows them to run web-based bot attacks straight from victims' browsers, including DDoS campaigns and cross-site requests resulting in impersonation of users in third-party websites.

Furthermore, the detection of such bot attack by a third-party is more complex than in regular distributed attacks, since real humans actually use the Chrome tab abused to attack the victim third-party.

The lecture will include an intro on Chrome Extension architecture followed by techniques to abuse this architecture in order to run bot attacks, as well as distribute a malicious extensions to big crowds of victims.

Speaker Bio

Worked as a security consultant in several places, one of the founders of Magshimim Cyber Training Program.

Technical Level: Intermediate / Advanced Language: Hebrew, English

Could a few lines of code  it all up!
 Amit Ashbel, Director of Product Marketing & Cyber Security Evangelist, Checkmarx 

March 2016. An anonymous open source developer decides to remove his code (left-pad) from a public repository.

Shortly thereafter, several large organizations felt the impact of his actions. Facebook, AirBnB and others experienced errors impacting the functionality of their services. Packages using “left-pad” wouldn’t properly execute.

Today, we embrace both the open source community and the growth of open source projects, modules and packages but... Dependencies and recursive dependencies might become a risk or even a new attack vector which we didn’t foresee.

Could there be other cases of common and popular open source packages depending on open source modules that might not be there tomorrow or, even worse, could they be maliciously modified?

Join us for an insightful session that will reveal our research on this topic where you will learn:
 * Which common open source packages might not be there tomorrow and how this can affect you?
 * How packages you use could be maliciously modified impact on your app Discuss the risks introduced by hybrid application development
 * How intertwined and complex dependencies have become

Speaker Bio

Amit has been with the security community for more than a decade where he has taken on multiple tasks and responsibilities, including technical and Senior Product lead positions. Amit adds valuable product knowledge including experience with a wide range of security platforms and familiarity with emerging threats. Amit also speaks at high profile events and conferences such as BlackHat, Defcon, OWASP and others.

Technical Level: Introduction Language: English

Crippling HTTPS with unholy PAC
 Amit Klein, VP Security Research, SafeBreach 

You're in a potentially malicious network (free WiFi, guest network, or maybe your own corporate LAN). You're a security conscious netizen so you restrict yourself to HTTPS (browsing to HSTS sites and/or using a "Force TLS/SSL" browser extension). All your traffic is protected from the first byte. Or is it?

We will demonstrate that, by forcing your browser/system to use a malicious PAC (Proxy AutoConfiguration) resource, it is possible to leak HTTPS URLs. We will explain how this affects the privacy of the user and how credentials/sessions can be stolen. We will present the concept of "PAC Malware" (a malware which is implemented only as JavaScript logic in a PAC resource) that features: a 2-way communication channel between the PAC malware and an external server, contextual phishing via messages, denial-of-service options, and sensitive data extraction from URI's. We present a comprehensive browser PAC feature matrix and elaborate more about this cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac) and cross-browser (IE, Chrome, Safari) threat.

Speaker Bio

Amit Klein is a world renowned information security expert, with 25 years in information security and over 30 published technical papers on this topic. Amit is VP Security Research at SafeBreach, responsible for researching various infiltration, exfiltration and lateral movement attacks. Before SafeBreach, Amit was CTO for Trusteer (acquired by IBM) for 8.5 years. Prior to Trusteer, Amit was chief scientist for Cyota (acquired by RSA) for 2 years, and prior to that, director of Security and Research for Sanctum (acquired by Watchfire, now part of IBM security division) for 7 years. Amit has a B.Sc. from the Hebrew University (magna cum laude, Talpiot program), recognized by InfoWorld as a CTO of the year 2010, and has presented at HITB, RSA, OWASP, CertConf, BlueHat, CyberTech, APWG and AusCERT.

Technical Level: Intermediate Language: Hebrew

Don't Feed the Hippos!
 Martin Knobloch, Principal Consultant, Nixu 

The security community is trying to solve insecurity caused by bugs and flaws in software for many years now, but with what success?

We almost never look in successes and failures experiences in other areas, but we could really learn from. This talk is inspired by Ernesto Sirolli’s TED talk “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!” about failures in the aid program’s around the world. Listening to Ernesto Sirolli, you cannot miss the similarity with the security community trying to tell developers how to write secure code. This talk points out common failures of the security community when communicating with developers, trying to solve their problems without understanding what their problems really are.

Using the hippo-analogy for security failures, during the talks those ‘(in-)secure hippos’ are identified, advice on how to avoid them are provided, by anecdotes and best practices from the experience of the past 10 years in the security field as a consultant.

Speaker Bio

Martin is Principal Consultant at Nixu BeNeLux (https://www.nixu.com/en/nixubenelux). His main working area is (software) security in general, from awareness to implementation. In his daily work, he is responsible for education in application security matters, advise and implementation of application security measures.

With his background in Java Development, he understands the complexity of Enterprise software development, Agile Scrum environments and continuous delivery / deployment.

Martin got involved in OWASP in 2006. He became a member of the OWASP Netherland Chapter board in 2007. He has contributed to several OWASP projects and is co-organizer of the OWASP BeNeLux-Day conference since 2008. Martin has been chair of the Global Education Committee from 2008 until the ending of the Global Committees.

Futher, Martin is the conference chair of the OWASP AppSec-Eu/Research 2015 conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and involved in the AppSec-Eu 2016 among other activities as CfT Co-Chair.

Martin is a frequent speaker at universities, hacker spaces and various conferences.

Technical Level: Intermediate / Advanced Language: English

Hacking HTTP/2 - New attacks on the Internet’s Next Generation Foundation
 Nadav Avital, Application Security Research Team Leader, Imperva 

 Noam Mazor, Security Research Engineer, Imperva 

HTTP/2 is the emerging network protocol for the Internet, facilitating leaner and faster web browsing by introducing several new mechanisms which can be seen as a single transition layer for web traffic. The adoption of HTTP/2 is lightning fast, and even though only a year has passed since its publication, HTTP/2 is already supported by all significant players in the field including browsers, web servers and Content Delivery Networks.

In the presentation we will overview the HTTP/2 attack surface - stream multiplexing, flow control, HPACK compression and server push, with a focus on how the way HTTP/2 servers implement these mechanisms can make or break your security posture. We will continue with presenting new classes of vulnerabilities that have been introduced by the mechanisms used with HTTP/2, and explaining how these vulnerabilities can be used for mounting effective attacks against web servers like Apache, IIS, Ngnix, Jetty and nghttp. We will explain in detail several serious zero-day vulnerabilities, such as CVE-2016-1546, CVE-2016-0150 and CVE-2016-1544, and end with discussing several approaches for mitigating attacks of these types.

Those attending this session will understand that:
 * As an emerging technology that introduces novel and flexible mechanisms, HTTP/2 also induces new risks.
 * HTTP/2 implementations are still not “security mature.” Therefore it is almost certain that scrutiny of HTTP/2 implementations will increase in coming years, resulting in the discovery of new vulnerabilities, exploits and security patches. With HTTP/2 gaining more popularity, this trend will intensify.
 * An effective security strategy for newly adopted technologies must rely on supplemental solutions rather than patching

Speaker Bio

Nadav Avital is an expert in Web Application Security. He leads an Imperva team who captures and analyzes hacking activities and then create mitigation strategies. These efforts result in research for new technologies and protocols. Nadav has more than 10 years industry experience in coding and creating security tools. He holds B.Sc. in Computer Science.

Speaker Bio

Noam Mazor worked in Imperva as security research engineer in the Web Application Security team. Noam has experience in analyzing hacking activities, creating mitigation and researching vulnerabilities. He holds BSc in Computer Science and is currently a MSc student in Tel Aviv University.

Technical Level: Intermediate Language: Hebrew

Hacking RF based IoT Systems
 Erez Metula, Application Security Expert, AppSec Labs (Founder) 

We often encounter IoT (Internet of Things) systems during our work as penetration testers and security consultants. We know how to assess the security of the server side API, the associated mobile apps, the web apps and so on - but what about the device itself (the "thing")? Moreover, what happens if the device is not using traditional HTTP/S request, or does not even "speak" plain old TCP/IP?

During this talk, we'll go over the obstacles we have to face when analyzing unknown, custom RF based communication that drives the target IoT system we're pentesting. We'll talk about and see in action tools that will allow us to capture RF traffic, analyze it, brute force it, replay it, and of course forge it. It's like plain old appsec hacking tricks, but at the RF level. So let's hack some physical things belonging to the real world!

Speaker Bio

Erez Metula is the founder and Chairman of AppSec Labs, a leading company in the field of application security.

He is the author of the book "Managed Code Rootkits", and is a world renowned application security expert.

Erez has extensive hands-on experience performing security assessments, code reviews and secure development trainings for worldwide organizations, and had previously talked at international security conferences such as BlackHat, Defcon, OWASP, RSA, SOURCE, CanSecWest and more. Erez had helped companies from all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 organizations.

Erez focuses on advanced application security topics and has performed extensive ground breaking research on mobile application security.

Erez holds an MSc in computer science and he is CISSP.

Technical Level: Advanced Language: Hebrew, English

Java Hurdling: Obstacles and Techniques in Java Client Penetration-testing
 Tal Melamed, Technical Leader, AppSec Labs 

Testing Client applications is not always straightforward as testing web applications. There might be obstacles coming your way: what is the communication protocol? how do you MitM? how do you modify code? and many more.

Fortunately, Java is still Java. This lecture will follow the events of a real case of pen-testing a Java client application ; what tools and techniques can be used in order to overcome hurdles, all the way to the finish line.

The lecture aims to enrich the pentester's toolbox as well as mind, when facing a Java Client Application; MitM-ing, Patching and Run-time manipulations are only some of the discussed cases.

Speaker Bio

Tal is an Application Security Expert. As AppSec Labs' Technical Leader, he is leading a variety of security projects for Android, iOS, WP, Web and Client applications.

Prior to working at AppSec Labs, Tal has worked at Amdocs, CheckPoint and RSA, having more than a decade of experience in the Information Security field.

Tal is a lead Trainer, a neat developer, and a security dreamer; breaking, building, defending & training since '99.

Technical Level: Intermediate / Advanced Language: Hebrew, English

NodeJS Security Done Right​ - The tips and tricks they won’t teach you in school​
 Liran Tal, R&D Team Leader, Hewlett Packard Enterprise 

NodeJS, and JavaScript at large are quickly taking over software whether it is GitHub’s statistics for projects growth, the IoT industry, ChatOps projects written in JavaScript and Enterprises adoption is growing as well.

With this trend, it is imperative to review OWASP security practices and learn how to harden NodeJS Web Applications.​ ​ We will begin with a quick NodeJS intro and a few fail stories of how things can go wrong. ​

We will quickly dive into hands-on practical implementation of security measures to adopt in your current or future NodeJS project. Next I will show how to leverage widely adopted security tools for integration in the build and CI/CD process to audit and test for security vulnerabilities, as well as leveraging successful enterprise-level open source npm libraries to enhance your web application’s security.​ ​ In summary: in this session I will demonstrate:​ ​ To empower others and make a lasting impression for Open Source awareness and Security involvement: In the closing minutes of this presentation I will ask a volunteer from the audience to commit a Pull-Request that enhances security for a NodeJS project on GitHub.​
 * Securing ExpressJS by adopting mature and commonly used npm libraries​
 * Secure code guidelines for JavaScript software developers​
 * Integrating NodeJS security measures as part of your build CI/CD DevOps process​

Speaker Bio

Liran is a top contributor to the open source MEAN.io, and core team member of the MEAN.js full stack JavaScript framework. He is also an author of several Node.js npm packages, as well as actively contributing to many open source projects on GitHub. Being an avid supporter and contributor to the open source movement, in 2007 he has redefined network RADIUS management by establishing daloRADIUS, a world-recognized and industry-leading open source project (http://www.daloradius.com). Liran is currently leading the R&D Engineering team for Hewlett Packard Enterprise content Marketplace, built on a microservices architecture for a combined technology stack of Java, NodeJS, AngularJS, MongoDB and MySQL. He loves mentoring and empowering team members, drive for better code methodology, and seek out innovative solutions to support business strategies. He enjoys spending his time with his beloved wife Tal, and his son Ori. Amongst other things, his hobbies include playing the guitar, hacking all things Linux and continuously experimenting and contributing to open source projects.

Technical Level: Introduction Language: Hebrew, English

Putting the "I" in Code Review - Turning Code Review Interactive
 Tamir Shavro,	Seeker R&D Manager, Synopsys 

Everybody knows that manual code review can be a tedious and lengthy effort, with complexity growing exponentially with the size of the code. However, understanding code flow and focusing on relevant parts can become much easier when employing interactive debugging techniques. This allows combining the best of penetration testing and code review benefits to achieve maximum results in the most efficient manner. In this talk we will explain and demonstrate this eye-opening technique for effectively performing a manual code review on a live system using a debugger and provide a quick starter kit for implementing this technique.

Speaker Bio TBC

Technical Level: Advanced Language: Hebrew, English

Signoff or Sign-Out
 Ofer Maor, Director of Security Strategy, Synopsys 

Software Signoff is an inevitable step in maturing our software development processes in order to deliver better and safer software. Like with other engineering disciplines before, the growing concerns for safety, security and standards is driving the industry to do better. In this talk we will explain what Software Signoff means and why organizations must adopt it before it is too late.

Speaker Bio

Ofer Maor is a security expert and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in information and application security. Ofer has been involved in application security from its early days, through research, penetration testing, consulting, and product development. As the founder and CTO of Seeker, Ofer pioneered IAST, the next generation of application security testing technology, currently used by some of the largest organizations in the world to continuously improve their software security. Ofer joined Synopsys when it acquired Seeker in July 2015. Prior to Seeker, Ofer was the Founder and CTO of Hacktics. He led Imperva's Application Defense Center research group and has also served as the Chairman of OWASP Israel and in the OWASP Global Membership Committee.

Technical Level: Intermediate Language: Hebrew, English

The Dark Side of Search Engines Optimizations
 Or Katz, Principal Security Researcher, Akamai 

Search engines optimization (SEO) is a technique being used by web sites owners in order to improve visibility and traffic to their web site. Legitimate SEO activity will use optimization techniques such as: changing structure and textual usage of the web site pages, publication in social media and web forums that will referrer relevant users.

The ultimate goal of SEO campaign is to promote web site ranking in the leading search engines, having the promoted web site returned in the primary result page once searching for relevant terms and keywords.

In the presentation I’m going to present what happens when threat actors get into the world of SEO campaigns abuse SEO optimization techniques and moreover, use all kind of attack techniques such as SQL injection and open redirects in order to manipulate search engines ranking.

I will also evaluate some of the SEO attacks and the manipulating techniques, try to determine who are the victims in this story, check if these attacks achieved their goal and supply more interesting insights on the world of “Blackhat SEO”.

Speaker Bio

Or is an application security veteran, with years of experience at industry leading vendors, currently serves as principal security researcher for Akamai's Cloud Security Intelligence platform. Or is a frequent speaker in conferences such as RSA, AppSec and CSA. Or has published several innovative articles and white papers on web applications threat intelligence and defensive techniques.

Technical Level: Intermediate Language: Hebrew

The Threat of Advanced Cross-Site Search Attacks
 Dr. Nethanel Gelernter, Cyberpion & The College of Management Academic Studies 

Cross-site search (XS-search) is a practical timing side-channel attack that allows the extraction of sensitive information from web-services. The attack exploits inflation techniques to efficiently distinguish between search requests that yield results and requests that do not. This work focuses on the response inflation technique that increases the size of the response; as the difference in the sizes of the responses increases, it becomes easier to distinguish between them. We begin with browser-based XS-search attack and demonstrate its use in extracting users' private data from Gmail and Facebook. The browser-based XS-search attack exploits the differences in the sizes of HTTP responses, and works even when significant inflation of the response is impossible. This part also involves algorithmic improvements compared to previous work. When there is no leakage of information via the timing side channel it is possible to use second-order (SO) XS-search, a novel type of attack that allows the attacker to significantly increase the difference in the sizes of the responses by planting maliciously crafted record into the storage. SO XS-search attacks can be used to extract sensitive information such as email content of Gmail and Yahoo! users, and search history of Bing users.

Speaker Bio

Nethanel Gelernter received a PhD in Computer Science from Bar-Ilan University (Israel). His research mainly focuses on web application security, and in particular in exploring new attack vectors and threats in the web. Currently, he is leading the cyber security research and studies in the College of Management Academic Studies in Israel. Beyond the academic world, Nethanel provides consulting services, and he recently founded Cyberpion, a company that investigates unknown attack vectors and develops countermeasures against them.

Technical Level: Advanced Language: Hebrew

The Unwanted Sons - Formalizing and Demonstrating WAF Bypass Methods for the REST of the Top 10
 Shay Chen, CEO, Effective Security 

The once uncommon application-level protection mechanisms are EVERYWHERE these days, and sooner or later, you'll have to face them.

Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), Filters and RASP Modules, all common and widespread countermeasures you have to face on a regular basis, with the power to turn a typical assessment into a nightmare, and make automated tools practically useless.

While the attack vectors are well covered in CWE, CAPEC, TECAPI RvR, WASC, OWASP Top 10 and Testing Guide, all you have to cover evasion techniques is a couple of cheat sheets focused on a limited set of attacks.

Sure, there are numerous XSS and SQL Injection evasion cheat sheets, but what about Path Traversal, Remote File Inclusion, OS Command Injection? What about Forced Browsing? What about other attacks?

Formalizing evasion techniques and methods for the REST of the common attack vectors makes a LOT of sense, for manual pen-testing and automated tools - and THIS is phase one, aimed to cover the rest of the unattended top 10.

Speaker Bio

Shay Chen is the CEO of Effective Security, an information-security boutique company specializing in information security assessments and in automating security processes of vulnerability management and SDLC.

He has over twelve years in information technology and security, a strong background in software development, and a stream of previously published vulnerabilities, attack vectors, benchmarks and hacking methodologies.

Shay is an experienced speaker, and regularly instructs a wide variety of security related courses in Conferences and Enterprises. Before moving into the information security field, he was involved in various software development projects in ERP, mobile & enterprise environments.

Technical Level: Intermediate / Advanced Language: Hebrew

The Ways Hackers Are Taking To Win The Mobile Malware Battle
 Yair Amit, CTO & Co-founder, Skycure 

In the proverbial game of cat-and-mouse between endpoint security vendors and malware writers, malware attacks have recently grown more sophisticated. More enterprises are losing ground to hackers, who are able to outmaneuver static and runtime solutions by constantly changing their attack strategies. The team that uncovered iOS malicious profiles, WiFiGate, HTTP Request Hijacking, No iOS Zone and Invisible Profiles are taking it upon themselves to coach developers and organizations on how to regain control, and turn the tables on the hackers behind next-generation mobile malware.

In his presentation, Yair will discuss cutting-edge techniques used by malware writers to circumvent mobile security paradigms such as app-sandboxing and containers. Mr. Amit will then break down the current set of techniques (signatures, static analysis & dynamic analysis) used to identify malware on mobile devices, and identify the pros and cons of these approaches. He will also explain why attackers constantly succeed in fooling these technologies, and explore the problem of false positive/false negative tradeoffs in such solutions.

During a live, interactive demo, Yair will create a mobile malware on stage, meant to be undetected by static and runtime analysis technologies.

Speaker Bio

Yair Amit is co-founder and CTO at Skycure, leading the company’s research and vision and overseeing its R&D center. Yair has been active in the security industry for more than a decade with his research regularly covered by media outlets and presented in security conferences around the world. Prior to co-founding Skycure, Yair managed the Application Security and Research Group at IBM, joining through the acquisition of Watchfire. At IBM, Yair led the research and implementation of IBM’s next-generation application security technology. Yair holds a BSc, summa cum laude, from Tel Aviv University in bioinformatics.

Technical Level: Intermediate / Advanced Language: Hebrew, English