Atlanta Member Meeting 10.13.10

October 2010 Meeting
WHAT:: October Chapter Meeting - Rapid development of web security tools using SpiderSense

WHEN:: October 13th 2010 - 7-9PM

WHERE:: Room # 053, College of Computing, Georgia Tech | Maps and Directions

WHO:: Steve Millar, GTRI

Steve Millar is a Senior Research Engineer with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). He is interested in .NET and all things on the web. So, building web tools is a passion that he simply cannot ignore. Steve is interested in building a high-performance framework for rapidly constructing any kind of web tool that can be imagined by humans. He is also keenly interested in building a thriving community around this code and overall concept. In a former life, Steve was the lead architect and SW development manager for HP's WebInspect product line where he spent a lot of time obsessing over how to automate web security tasks inside a large, complex, multi-threaded application. Hopefully he learned enough to help make this simpler for less obsessed people. Steve also thinks it is strange to refer to himself in the third person.

ABSTRACT:: 

Web Security tools are everywhere and they come in multiple flavors from freely downloadable binaries to open source libraries to commercial application suites. Unfortunately, they never seem to do exactly what you need and they are not always easy to extend or configure. Wouldn't it be nice if the tools were inter-operable, easy to construct (think Lego blocks) and high-performance? Something more useful than just a few Python scripts and a prayer. Georgia Tech's Cyber Technology and Information Security Lab is on a mission to provide such a tool framework.

SpiderSense is a .NET code library and suite of tools that enables rapid development of web security tools and data mining applications. The core pillars of SpiderSense are a high performance web crawler, a modular and extensible analysis engine and pluggable content parsers. These modules can be combined quickly and flexibly to create data gathering and discovery tools. SpiderSense also enables the crafting of non-standard HTTP payloads that can be used in automated penetration testing and web-based exploitation. The framework also uses a plug-in analysis model to allow experimentation with a broad range of analysis algorithms. If you can do it with HTTP then you can do it with SpiderSense.

We will show just a few slides to outline the problem then quickly dive into SpiderSense starting with demonstrations of a few tools and finishing with a discussion of architecture, community and the development roadmap. Hopefully we can get some good brain-storms to occur around the topics of cool features and ways for the community to contribute. The speaker also wants to walk away with some great ideas about possible extensibility points from the audience. Bring your thinking cap and your good ideas about web tools and we'll roll up our sleeves and talk code!

Presentation::