2012 BASC Presentations

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

Data center security teams are being challenged to rapidly deploy and secure new applications while controlling costs and improving efficiency. In this presentation, we will provide an inside look at some of the problems with traditional access management implementations and how enterprises can sucessfully overcome these challenges by integrating web application firewall technologies with Identity and Access Management. Learn about best practices, specific use cases and how this new integration translates into operational simplicity for the enterprise.

Fuzzing is easy, but getting useful information from fuzzing isn’t. ‘Spray and pray’ might get some results, but a set of well-designed tests will get much better results faster. Unfortunately, the job doesn’t end there. Fuzzing doesn’t find vulnerabilities; fuzzing finds unexpected behavior. Interpreting that unexpected behavior relies on understanding the application you’re fuzzing and the tests you’ve designed. This presentation will discuss techniques for creating tests targeted towards uncovering specific behavior, including authorization bypasses, directory traversals, and buffer overflows.

Increasingly "real-time" web applications require new hacks on-top of HTTP that requires server support (e.g. WebSockets, SPDY); this presentation will demonstrate how this new functionality permits attackers to more effectively, and more stealthily establish bidirectional communication with compromised hosts; thus bypassing any outbound connection restrictions. We will cover the theory, historical techniques, defensive methodologies and new techniques throughout the presentation.

At the heart of these techniques is the ability to establish arbitrary bidirectional TCP connections given vulnerabilities in web applications, even in the presence of restrictive DMZ firewalls; this is a "well-known" attacker methodology. Attackers have for many years known to abuse the trusted relationship between web servers (or any exposed service!) and perimeter firewalls (inbound ports). Generally these tricks come at a price and are something that can be detected by a vigilant security team.

We will discuss how attackers can easily bypass outbound firewall rules, the history of these methodologies, and common defensive techniques combating this threat. Furthermore, new techniques will be described that utilize "real-time" protocols; specifically, how can these new techniques create back-channels and simultaneously hide from those vigilant security teams, increase the throughput and reliability of an attacker’s "VPN", and arbitrarily direct traffic from the internet into a DMZ environment.

Audience: This class is open to all

This 50-minute class will give students a basic understanding of what is Metasploit, some of the features it allows and examples of how it can be used. This includes Meterpreter basics, the MSF command line interface, MSF console, using exploits and payloads. One example exploit that may be shown is the MS08-067 vulnerability and maybe another one per the class's choosing, time-permitting. This class is in no way the full class and is designed to get you using Metasploit in the class's timeframe.

Students are expected to already have Metasploit installed on their laptops (Download at http://www.metasploit.com/download/) with VMWare Workstation (trial version or the full version) with Windows XP (trial version or full that is not patched) OS installed as well. There will be no technical support because of the limited class time and we will be on an internal class wired network. All notes will be made available.

Hardware and Software Requirements: A. The recommended is at least 50GB+ of hardrive space B. 4GB or more of RAM C. The more horsepower (CPU) you have, the better for virtual machines D. Metasploit installed E. VMWare Workstation F. Windows XP (unpatched) virtual machine

Audience: Students that have taken the fundamental elements class or students that have an understanding of Metasploit or have already used it

This 1-hour course will continue where the fundamental elements class left off. This will be a quick overview of some of the mostly used features of Metasploit including information gathering and vulnerability scanning. We may have time to go over some exploit development, defeating antivirus and/or meterpreter scripting. This class will not cover MSF post exploitation.

Students are expected to already have Metasploit installed on their laptops (Download at http://www.metasploit.com/download/) with VMWare Workstation (trial version or the full version) with Windows XP (trial version or full that is not patched) OS installed as well. There will be no technical support because of the limited class time and we will be on an internal class wired network. All notes will be made available.

Hardware and Software Requirements: A. The recommended is at least 50GB+ of hardrive space B. 4GB or more of RAM C. The more horsepower (CPU) you have, the better for virtual machines D. Metasploit installed E. VMWare Workstation F. Windows XP (unpatched) virtual machine

The number one threat to mobile devices and applications is loss or theft of the device. The old security mantra of, "if an attacker has physical access, it is game over" is more relevant to mobile devices than virtually any other technology security practitioners have been tasked with securing. For this reason it is imperative for organizations to clearly understand their risk when deploying or supporting these devices.

Learning Objectives

Discover and explore physical locations on Apple iOS devices where sensitive information is commonly stored. Discover and explore physical locations on Google Android devices where sensitive information is commonly stored. Learn to mitigate risks through effective use of Mobile Device Management ("MDM") technology, device configuration, policy, and secure development.

Why choose this talk?

According to my research, I coined the term "offensive mobile forensics". By definition, this activity is the preemptive analysis of mobile devices and applications to quantitatively measure your organization's level of risk caused by the proliferation and use of today's mobile technology. Anyone that has performed research in this area knows mobile devices are potential trojan horses for virtually every organization. This talk arms attendees with the information and tools required to conductoffensive mobile forensics in their own environments.

People have been talking about secure Software Development Life Cycles (SDLCs) for years, but there has been little traction in scaling secure SDLC activities outside of a few very security-conscious companies. We assert that a key reason for this is that to scale, these processes require automation. Static analysis, web application firewalls, and dynamic testing are the primary methods many organizations use to secure their applications because these tools can scale effectively. However, there is widespread acknowledgement that relying solely on verification activities for security is neither cost effective nor holistic. In fact, a 2012 study by SD Elements (to be published) indicates that on average 42% of security requirements are NOT covered by automated static and/or dynamic testing tools. To efficiently scale secure SDLC, we emphasize on process automation via criteria-based requirement generation, contextual on-the-job training for developers, and smart checklists. Our data indicates a significant savings for the organization on remediation costs. This talk discusses the process automation in detail and demonstrates how it effectively scales to large development teams.

In the event that your password table gets into the wild, how long will it take an attacker to expose the plaintext passwords? The recent set of well publicized disclosures of user passwords raised the question of whether current best practices adequately protect passwords from brute force attacks by many of our clients. In addition, with the advent of GPU-based (or FPGA) computing where GPUs are used for general purpose computing, are the current defenses and practices built for brute-force attacks sufficient? Cigital reviewed the current hardware innovations, analyzed the current methods for protecting passwords at rest and whether the methods sufficiently protected the passwords from being revealed using today’s hardware.

This talk discusses the pros and cons of the current practices such as salted-hashes, adaptive hashes and proposes an alternative solution for strengthening these existing practices. The talk will discuss the cryptographic properties of the current practices, but does not require a PhD in mathematics to understand the details.

Securing mobile applications is a multi-dimensional problem space, carrying with it elements of desktop security, web application security, and network security. Coupled with a large attack space is the additional security issue of technological infancy. Since the mobile application space is still an emerging technology, the threat space is still being defined. This continuously growing, rapidly changing, and large threat space represents a significant risk to the enterprise. Developers can minimize this threat by introducing a number of secure development practices into the SDLC.

Because the technologies behind mobile application development are changing rapidly, secure development tools are not yet comprehensive. However, good processes that combine these tools with design, development, and testing methodologies can bridge the security gap as the tools grow and become more effective. An effective security program will engage available tools across the SDLC. At a minimum, secure mobile application development should include threat modeling, static analysis/whitebox testing, and blackbox testing. This testing should focus on attacks against the network component, the server component, and the client component.

The presentation will focus on implementing secure development methodologies with an emphasis on:


 * 1) Threat Modeling
 * 2) Threat modeling methodologies for Mobile Application development
 * 3) Threat modeling 3rd party applications
 * 4) Protecting PII on the device
 * 5) Whitebox Testing
 * 6) Static analysis availability, strengths, and limitations
 * 7) Whitebox testing tools
 * 8) Whitebox client side testing
 * 9) PII Storage issues
 * 10) Client side attack vectors
 * 11) Blackbox Testing
 * 12) Blackbox testing tools
 * 13) Blackbox proxy issues
 * 14) Blackbox server issues

Identifying application-level vulnerabilities via scanning, penetration tests and code reviews is only the first step in actually addressing the underlying risk. Managing vulnerabilities for applications is more challenging than dealing with traditional infrastructure-level vulnerabilities because they typically require the coordination of security teams with application development teams. The process also means that security managers need to get time from developers during already-cramped development and release schedules. In addition, fixes require changes to custom application code and application-specific business logic rather than the patches and configuration changes that are often sufficient to address infrastructure-level vulnerabilities. This presentation will illustrate the communication difficulties between security and development teams, and how this usually results in unactionable reports and fewer vulnerabilities remediated. In addition, the presentation will walk through an example workflow of addressing application vulnerabilities as software defects. This will be based on freely-available tools and show specific examples of how vulnerabilities can be grouped together, false positives can be culled out, and vulnerabilities transitioned to software defects, as well as how security managers can monitor and verify progress.

We cannot “firewall” or “patch” our way to secure websites. In the past, security professionals thought firewalls, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), patching, and privacy policies were enough. Today, however, these methods are outdated and ineffective, as attacks on prominent, well-protected websites are occurring every day. Organizations around the world rely on highly accurate, scalable and continuous Web security services to maintain the safety of their websites in today’s hostile online environment. Website developers must also learn to code in a secure fashion to have any chance of providing organizations with proper defenses in the current threat-scape. The session will provide specific tips and guidelines to make website code both low risk and less vulnerable.

Despite over a decade of taking information security "seriously", we have yet to eradicate even one of the OWASP Top 10. The way we approach application security today often wastes a lot of time and money and doesn't yield very good results.

This talk shines a light on some of the things we do that we think are helping, but actually contribute more to the problem than the solution. Along the way, it covers a number of common practices that are getting us nowhere fast and offers suggestions for improvement for each one.