Boston

BASC - The Boston Application Security Conference
OWASP Boston will host the Boston Application Security Conference on October 3, 2015.

Follow @BASConf on Twitter. Use hashtag #basc2015

Visit BASC on LinkedIn

Chapter Meetings --- Our Tenth Year
We now use meetup to organize meetings.

We usually meet the FIRST WEDNESDAY of EVERY MONTH (Unless a speaker can only present another night), 6:30 to 9 pm.

Everyone is welcome to come to any meeting, there is no signup or joining criteria, just come if it sounds interesting. Feel free to sign up to the OWASP Boston mailing list. This list is very low volume (2 - 3 emails/month); it is used to remind people about each monthly meeting, inform about local application security events and special chapter offers.

Most meetings are held at Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA.

Upcoming Meetings
June 2015

When: Wednesday, June 3, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

6:30 News, views, announcements, conversation 7:00 Put Down the Megaphone: Effective Security Advocacy Without the Shouting - Darren Meyer

10 years’ experience in the InfoSec community--including work with organizations in many verticals, in sizes ranging from startups to Fortune 50 enterprises, leading Application Security teams, building and delivering security instruction to developers, managers, and InfoSec professionals—has taught me the importance of crafting advocacy for different audiences. In this talk, I share my experiences in learning to be an effective advocate with three key audiences: developers, management, and non-technical staff.

Darren is an Application Security advocate and researcher, technology hobbyist, and maker. He loves to learn, teach, nerd out, and inflict terrible puns on people. His background includes logistics, software development, and an assortment of information security roles including leading AppSec programs and professional security instruction targeting developers, managers, and InfoSec professionals.

Past Meetings
May 2015

When: Wednesday, May 6, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

6:30 News, views, announcements, conversation 7:00 How the crowd is discovering critical vulns missed by traditional methods - Leif Dreizler

State of the art security programs are turning to bug bounties to leverage a vast array of skill-sets and knowledge. Learn why these programs work, when to deploy them, and how you can bring these new application security testing capabilities into your own organization. The speaker will discuss real world examples from bug bounties and focus on cases where business logic flaws and high priority vulnerabilities were found ... even with existing security testing processes in place.

Attendees will learn:

Testing methods deployed by our crowd that help them find bugs the scanners miss

Examples of the high quality of bugs our crowd is finding, including P1'sTrends which vulnerability types are found most often and whyWhat is the ROI on the pay for performance modelWhere does the SDLC merge into crowdsourced testing

Leif Dreizler is a Senior Security Engineer at Bugcrowd, the innovator in crowdsourced security testing for the enterprise. Prior to joining Bugcrowd, Leif was a Senior Application Security Engineer at Redspin, performing application security assessments. During his time at Redspin he also served as the Application Team Lead, liaising with clients at the engineering and sales level. He has also made minor contributions to the Firebug project. Leif attended the University of California, Santa Barbara where he studied Computer Science. Leif recently spoke to the NYC Security Meet-up group.

April 2015

When: Wednesday, April 1, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

6:30 News, views, announcements, conversation

Jim Weiler Will show some actual examples and patterns of SQL Injection attempts 7:00 '''Are You An Imposter? Me too! - Patrick Laverty'''

Many people in the information security field feel like a fraud, or an imposter. In reality, we often know far more, and are capable of far more than we believe we do. There is so much to know and we constantly hear about the latest groundbreaking research done by others, which makes us feel less important or worthy. Let’s talk about what Imposter Syndrome is, its prevalence, and then we can start to realize just how capable we are and go forward with the confidence in the field.

March 2015

When: Wednesday, March 4, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

6:30 News, views, announcements, conversation 7:00 Prioritizing Web Application Vulnerabilities – A Hacker’s Perspective - Nick Silver

The best application risk models capture not only the technical risk factors, but also the business context in which an asset lives. Traditionally, this is done by auditing application owners on an array of questions in order to properly classify the asset and its data – but that takes time which could be better spent elsewhere. We interviewed dozens of hackers and asked them which vulnerabilities they would look for first depending on the type of attack they wanted to carry out. We’ll walk through several examples of how to use this data as a shortcut means for prioritizing risk without the need for any pesky audit questionnaires.

Nick Silver is a Senior Solutions Architect with WhiteHat Security. He is responsible for translating business requirements into technical ones and assisting businesses in implementing web security programs. Previously, Nick led a team in WhiteHat’s Threat Research Center where they were responsible for testing more than 2,000 of their customers’ websites for vulnerabilities.

February 2015

When: Wednesday, February 4, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

6:30 News review, announcements - Jim Weiler 7:00 Incident Response and Web Application Security - Stories from the Trenches - Fred House and Joe Ceirante

Mandiant has conducted numerous incident response engagements throughout its history, including a record number of 200 incidents in 2014. Mandiant consultants Fred House and Joe Ceirante will discuss case studies and trends Mandiant has observed in relation to web application security. Topics will include the types of threat actors that target web applications, the techniques they use to compromise web applications, and the activities they perform once inside the network. Techniques for detecting and mitigating web compromises will also be reviewed. All content will be derived from the real-world compromises that Mandiant has investigated.

January 2015

When: Wednesday, January 7, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

6:30 News review, risk analysis of Poodle - Jim Weiler 7:00 How a Hacker Views Your Web Site - Patrick Laverty

The most popular presentation of BASC 2014

As defenders, we have to be right 100% of the time where an attacker only needs to be right once. The attack surface of a modern web site is incredibly large and we need to be aware of all of it. Additionally, individual attacks may not always be effective but sometimes using them together can gain the desired effect. In this talk, we’ll take a look at the whole attack surface for a typical web site and the various ways that an attacker will use to compromise a site.

December 2014

When: Wednesday, December 3, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

6:30 News and Views You Can Use and Abuse - Jim Weiler

7:15 Swift and Security - Ming Chow Apple is pushing its new programming language Swift for iOS development and for many good reasons. This talk will discuss what the language has right in terms of security, the old and new security pitfalls, and what developers need to be aware of moving forward with using the new language. The fact to the matter is, iOS isn't going away, iOS developers will need to learn and use Swift, and there will be a big rush of Swift-based apps: we might as well learn how to do it right the first time around. Ming Chow is an Instructor at the Department of Computer Science, Tufts University. Ten years of web development experience. Specialties: Web and Mobile Development, Web and Mobile Security
 * Some thoughts and analysis on some current app security news and other stuff
 * Adobe password breach
 * Reducing Web Application Firewall SQL injection false positives

July 2014

Topics: Grails Security and Validating Cross-Site Scripting Vulns with xssValidator

Presenters: Cyrus Malekpour and John Poulin

When: Tuesday, July 8, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

Topic 1: Grails Security

Grails is a framework developed for Groovy in the vein of Rails for Ruby. It provides a lot of features for web app security, but does it do enough? What might you need to implement yourself, and what might be provided? This presentation will discuss tips on securing Grails applications, including tools that the framework provides by default for security. It'll also discuss several shortcomings in the current toolset, and how you can avoid them. Cyrus Malekpour (@cmalekpour) is currently interning at nVisium, working on web app development and security. He's currently an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia, where he's studying computer science with an emphasis on security and backend development. Topic 2: Validating Cross-Site Scripting Vulns with xssValidator xssValidator is a tool developed to automate the testing and validation of Cross-Site Scripting (xss) vulnerabilities within web applications. Automated scanners tend to report large amounts of false-positives, and as consultants we're forced spending our time trying to verify these findings. xssValidator leverages scriptable web-browsers such as PhantomJS and Slimer.js to automatically validate these findings. John Poulin is an application security consultant for nVisium who specializes in web application security. He worked previously as a web developer and software engineer that focused on building multi-tier web applications. When he's not hacking on web apps, John spends his time building tools to help him hack on web apps! You can find him on twitter: @forced_request and on myspace: REDACTED.

June 2014

Topic: Training: SQL Injection and the OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)

Presenters: Rob Cheyne and Jim Weiler

When: Wednesday, June 4, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

6:30 - general networking, news discussion, announcements.

7:00 - main presentations

The June 4th meeting will be the second in our series of 2014 training meetings. Rob Cheyne will continue explaining and exploring SQL Injection by conducting an actual injection attack.

This will be a demo-based discussion to get into the mindset of an attacker, and show how an attacker goes after a site. Demo will include:


 * BurpProxy demo
 * Common authentication flaws
 * SQL Injection Demo that shows the process and how it builds to a full compromise

Rob Cheyne is currently CEO of Big Brain Security. In addition to security consulting for Fortune 500 customers, he was the author of LC4, a version of the award-winning L0phtCrack password auditing tool, and he also worked on the code scanning technology that was eventually spun off as Veracode. Rob was at @stake from the very first customer all the way through to the $50M acquisition by Symantec.

Jim Weiler will introduce the OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP). This is a very powerful free OWASP intercepting proxy that lets you see, analyze, change, replay etc. every browser request and response, analyze your session, scan and attack web sites, save the results and run reports. We can't cover all the functionality but we'll show some practical tips and techniques.

Pizza, salad and soda courtesy of Akamai

March 2014

Topic: Training: SQL Injection, WebGoat, Cross Site Request Forgery Presenter: Benjamin Lerner When: Wednesday, March 5, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

There will be three training sessions:

One will be on SQL Injection - intro, detection, prevention, scanning and false positives. This is the most serious web application vulnerability.

The second will be on OWASP WebGoat. WebGoat is a deliberately insecure web application maintained by OWASP designed to teach web application security lessons. You can install and practice with WebGoat in either J2EE or in ASP.NET. In each lesson, users must demonstrate their understanding of a security issue by exploiting a real vulnerability in the WebGoat applications. There are hints and 39 different lesson plans on various vulnerabilities and technologies. We won't cover all of them of course!

The third will be on Cross Site Request Forgery - not a hack really, it's just the way the web works. But it causes apps to do legitimate things that you didn't ask them to do.

Pizza and drinks provided by Akamai.

January 2014

When: Wednesday, January 8, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

Topic: JavaScript Verification: From Browsers to Pages

Modern web browsers implement a "private browsing" mode that is intended to leave behind no traces of a user's browsing activity on their computer. This feature is in direct tension with support for *extensions*, which let users add third-party functionality into their browser. I will discuss the scope of this problem, present our approach to verifying extensions' compliance with private browsing mode, and sketch our findings on several real, third-party extensions. I will then briefly describe the toolkit underlying our approach, and end with a sketch of a newer project, adapting this approach to the very different-seeming problem of statically catching errors when using the jQuery library.

Presenter: Benjamin Lerner

Benjamin Lerner has just completed a post-doctoral research position in the PLT group at Brown University, and is now a lecturer at Northeastern University. His research examines the challenges of analyzing client-side web programming, from the behavior of web pages down through the semantics of the browser. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2011, building a platform to analyze conflicts between browser extensions, and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Yale University.

November 2013

When: Wednesday, November 6, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

Topic: Attacking iOS Applications

Slides: On slideshare

This presentation will cover the basics of attacking iOS applications (and their back ends) using a web proxy to intercept, modify, and repeat HTTP/HTTPS requests. (The proxy used during research was Burp; however, any HTTP intercepting proxy such as OWASP ZAP could be used) From setting up the proxy to pulling data from the backend systems, this talk will be a great primer for anyone interested in testing iOS applications at the HTTP protocol level. There will be a short (2 minute) primer on setting up the intercepting proxy, followed by three practical examples showing how to intercept data headed to the phone, how to modify data heading to the application server, and how to pull extra data from application servers to further an attack. All of these examples will focus on native iOS apps (Game Center and Passbook) and/or functionality (Passbook Passes).

Presenter: Karl Fosaaen

Karl is a senior security consultant at NetSPI. This role has allowed Karl to work in a variety of industries, including financial services, health care, and hardware manufacturing. Karl specializes in network and web application penetration testing. In his spare time, Karl helps out as an OPER at THOTCON and a swag goon at DEF CON.

October 2013

When: Wednesday, October 2, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

Topic: Abusing NoSQL Databases

The days of selecting from a few SQL database options for an application are over. There is now a plethora of NoSQL database options to choose from: some are better than others for certain jobs. There are good reasons why developers are choosing them over traditional SQL databases including performance, scalabiltiy, and ease-of-use. Unfortunately like for many hot techologies, security is largely an afterthought in NoSQL databases. This short but concise presentation will illustrate how poor the quality of security in many NoSQL database systems is. This presentation will not be confined to one particular NoSQL database system. Two sets of security issues will be discussed: those that affect all NoSQL database systems such as defaults, authentication, encryption; and those that affect specific NoSQL database systems such as MongoDB and CouchDB. The ideas that we now have a complicated heterogeneous problem and that defense-in-depth is even more necessary will be stressed. There is a common misconception that SQL injection attacks are eliminated by using a NoSQL database system. While specifically SQL injection is largely eliminated, injection attack vectors have increased thanks to JavaScript and the flexibility of NoSQL databases. This presentation will present and demo new classes of injection attacks. Attendees should be familiar with JavaScript and JSON.

Presenter: Ming Chow

Ming Chow (@tufts_cs_mchow) is a Lecturer at the Tufts University Department of Computer Science. His areas of work are in web and mobile engineering and web security. He teaches courses largely in the undergraduate curriculum including the second course in the major sequence, Web Programming, Music Apps on the iPad, and Introduction to Computer Security. He was also a web application developer for ten years at Harvard University. Ming has spoken at numerous organizations and conferences including the High Technology Crime Investigation Association - New England Chapter (HTCIA-NE), the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General (AGO), John Hancock, OWASP, InfoSec World (2011 and 2012), DEF CON 19 (2011), the Design Automation Conference (2011), Intel, and the SOURCE Conference (Boston 2013). Ming's projects in information security include building numerous CTF challenges, Internet investigations, HTML5 and JavaScript security, and Android forensics.

September 2013 - Joint Meeting with Boston Cloud Services

When: Tuesday, September 10, 6 pm

Location: Microsoft NERD Center (not our usual location)

'''Note: This is a joint meeting. Please register at the Boston Cloud Services meetup page if you plan to attend.'''

There will be two presentations at this meeting:

Topic: People Centric Security (PCS)

Presenter: Nick Stamos

People Centric Security (PCS) is a new security model, presented as part of Gartner's Maverick Research 2 year ago. PCS is well suited for Cloud Business/Consumer services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc. PCS enables users to have what they desire, and provides enterprises what they require for data governance and compliance. Nick Stamos co-founded his fourth company, nCrypted Cloud in July of 2012. His past startups include Verdasys, Phase Forward (IPO FY2004, $685M Oracle Acquisition 2010), and Amulet. He studied at Tufts University where he received a BSEE and MSEE.

Topic: SSL Certs

Presenter: Jim Weiler

Practical experiences with issuing and risk assessing SSL certs for enterprise applications on a cloud provider: who creates the CSR, how do you protect the private key on the cloud server, certs on cloud provider managed load balancers vrs 3rd party managed app servers, roles and responsibilities of cloud IT, 3rd party developer IT, enterprise IT and service providers. Jim Weiler is Application Security Architect at Starwoods Hotels and the Chapter Leader of OWASP Boston.

July 2013 - Doubleheader!

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

When: Wednesday, July 10, 6:30 pm

Topic: RailsGoat

Presented by: Ken Johnson

Abstract: While working to secure rails applications in a truly Agile development environment, it became clear that the Rails and Ruby ecosystem needed attention from the security community in the form of free and open training, and the events that have transpired within the last few months have only reinforced that belief. RailsGoat is an attempt to bring attention to both the problems that most frequently occur in Rails as well as the solutions for remediation. To accomplish this, we've built a vulnerable Rails application that aligns with the OWASP Top 10 and can be used as a training tool for Rails-based development shops.

Topic: PhoneGap on Android

Presented by: Jack Mannino

Abstract: PhoneGap is a widely used framework that allows developers to rapidly build cross-platform mobile applications using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Using PhoneGap plugins, developers can call native platform APIs from browser-like applications using JavaScript. This approach introduces vulnerabilities that are not typically as prevalent within native Android applications, warranting a fresh look at the way we view mobile applications. In this presentation, we will take a deep look at the Android implementation of the framework and we will examine the overall attack surface for applications. Real-world examples of vulnerable applications will be demonstrated as well in order to provide context, entertainment, and enjoyment.

About the Speakers:

Ken Johnson is the former Manager of LivingSocial.com's application security team where he built their security program before leaving for his true home as the CTO of nVisium Security, a VA-based application security company. Ken is the primary developer of the Web Exploitation Framework and contributes to other open source application security projects as often as time permits. He has spoken at AppSec DC 2010 and 2012, OWASP NoVA and Phoenix chapters, Northern Virginia Hackers Association (NoVAH) and is a contributor to the Attack Research team.

Jack Mannino is the CEO of nVisium Security, a VA-based application security company. At nVisium, he helps to ensure that large corporations, government agencies, and software startups have the tools they need to build and maintain successful security initiatives. He is an active Android security researcher/tinkerer, and has a keen interest in identifying security issues and trends on a large scale. Jack is a leader and founder of the OWASP Mobile Security Project. He is the lead developer for the OWASP GoatDroid project, and is the chairman of the OWASP Northern Virginia chapter.

June 2013

Topic: We see the future…and it isn’t pretty

Presented by: Andrea Mulligan, Sr. Director at Veracode

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

When: Wednesday, June 5, 6:30 pm

In this session Andrea presents research findings from the State of Software Security Report, which offers a before the breach look at security by examining the flaws commonly found in applications of all kinds. She will also examine what the research findings mean for security, predict how these flaws could cause history to repeat itself, and discuss how security pros can help change the future.

May 2013

Topic: Systems Thinking + Web Security

Presented by: Akamai

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

When: Wednesday, May 1, 6:30 pm

Akamai will present on ‘Systems Thinking + Web Security’. There will also be an audience review exercise facilitated by the Akamai presenters. This is a great chance to hear some interesting perspectives on web security from Akamai, who handles about one third of all internet traffic.

April 2013

Topic: '''Go Fast. Be Secure: Effectively Govern the Use of Open Source Components Throughout the SDLC'''

Presented by: Sonotype

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

When: Wednesday, April 3, 6:30 pm


 * Open Source Software (OSS) Component supply chain complexities and realities. Open source is constantly changing and knowing the version in your software, as well as the current version history of the component (how do you show an auditor you are using a current version) is important.
 * Open Source Consumption Patterns from the Central Repository. Which versions are the most popular can tell you which versions are the most stable, useful, secure etc.
 * OWASP Top 10 (A9) - Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. To decide on the risk of OSS components with vulnerabilities, you need to know the vulnerabilities, their severity and which components they occur in as well as where in the code dependency tree they are.
 * OSS Security, Quality and License policies must be woven into the development process. Knowing the number and type of open source licenses in your software can be important to the legal standing of your code and if it conflicts with any corporate standards. The licensing is also important in order to know the restrictions on changing the software.
 * OSS Component Policy Examples
 * Example Application Compositions Reports
 * Example Use cases IDE, CI, repository, production applications
 * Discussion

About Sonatype:

Sonatype operates the Central Repository, the industry's primary source for open-source components, housing more than 400,000 components and serving more than five billion requests per year from more than 60,000 organizations. The company has been a pioneer in component-based software development since its founding by Jason van Zyl, the creator of the Apache Maven build management system and the Central Repository.

March 2013

Topic: What is BSIMM?

Speaker: Nabil Hannan

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

Nabil is Director of Vulnerability Assessments and Managing Consultant at Cigital. The purpose of the BSIMM is to quantify the activities carried out by real software security initiatives. BSIMM is a study of the secure development practices of over 50 organizations, analyzed along the dimensions that were found in the data, not along preconceived ideas of what secure development should be.

BSIMM describes the work of 974 software security group members working with a satellite of 2039 people to secure the software developed by 218,286 developers.

The BSIMM describes 111 activities that any organization can put into practice. The activities are described in twelve practices grouped into four domains. Associated with each activity is an objective.

February 2013

Topic: BroBot

Speaker: Eric Kobrin, Akamai

When: Wednesday, February 6, 6:30 pm

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

Eric Kobrin is a Senior Security Architect in the Infosec organization of Akamai Technologies, the global leader in Cloud-based application acceleration and content delivery. Eric has been involved in Software Architecture for over 15 years, having worked at such companies and IBM, Velocitude and eDiets.com. He has a passion for programming languages, security, and software performance and has worked in all layers of the software stack from hypervisors to complex servers and web applications. Eric's works have been published, presented at international conferences and patented. His presentation will provide an analysis of the BroBot DDOS attacks, including discussion of:


 * Vulnerable system discovery
 * Zombie compromise
 * Control structure
 * Attack traffic
 * Mitigation steps

January 2013

Topic: Third-Party Application Analysis: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Speaker: Chad Holmes, Veracode

Location: Akamai at 8 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, MA

Chad Holmes will present details of the work Veracode has been doing with their 3rd Party program, discuss the technical and business challenges that have arisen during that time and lead a discussion on what team members can do to help drive adoption of security best practices across their vendor community.

The flow of the presentation is designed to drive discussion within an audience – both from a technical and business perspective with some anecdotal stories. Chad wants this to be an interactive discussion so he’ll have questions and you should bring yours I’ve already sent him some. The order of the presentation is:

·        Adoption rates of externally developed software

·        The risk within those apps

·        Some deeper stats on what “3rd party” really means (total outsourcing/total COTS produced/open source/imported libraries/etc)

·        Some raw data about our experiences (to show this is based on a large sample size rather than “Look how awesome Veracode is!”)

·        Challenges that will be faced (business, intellectual property, policy, analysis capabilities, etc)

·        Best Practices for high rates of adoption

·        Lessons Learned and Recommendations

Chad Holmes has over 10 years of software development and application security experience. During his time at Veracode, Chad has lead the redesign and execution of the third-party analysis process to allow for a more streamlined approach while still addressing common ISV intellectual property concerns. In addition to his third-party analysis responsibilities, Chad's previous work as a Security Program Manager has lead to the successful roll out and improvement of multiple corporate application security groups.

June 2012 Location - Microsoft Waltham (201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA)

Speaker Will Vandevanter - Rapid 7

Fingerprinting web applications of all kinds

This turbo talk will introduce a new Metasploit module that fingerprints "known" web applications, attempts the default credentials for the application, and runs an associated exploit or authenticated access module if applicable. Some example fingerprints in the database target common enterprise web applications including Microsoft products (Outlook Web Access, Sharepoint), printers (Xerox Document Centre), security cameras, routers, and others.

Will Vandevanter is a senior penetration tester and researcher at Rapid7. His focus interests include web application security and secure code. He has previously spoken at Defcon, SOURCE, BSides LV, and other conferences.

May 31 2012

Location - Jobspring, Boston. 545 Boylston st.

Speaker - Glenn Gramling, Vice President, Cenzic

“Cloudy with a Chance of Hack”

Cloud computing is a cost effective and efficient way for enterprises to automate their processes. However organizations need to be aware of the pitfalls of the many cloud solutions out there - one of the main being security. Most cloud applications were built for ease of use and without security necessarily in mind. Companies need to be asking their solution providers about the security measures used in developing the application and get an independent verification to make sure there are no gaping holes. With over 75% of attacks occurring through the Web, any attack through these applications can lead to leakage of confidential information and embarrassment. In this session, we'll give attendees tips and tricks to prepare them for the potential of "stormy weather."

Glenn Gramling is responsible for global sales and business development for Cenzic’s application security.

April 11, 2012

Location - Microsoft Waltham (201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA)

Speaker - David Eoff, Senior Product Marketing Manager, HP Enterprise Security

David is a Senior Product Marketing Manager, within the Enterprise Security Products division of HP focused on Fortify application security. His 18+ years of background in software and hardware enterprise marketing provides a solid foundation for his marketing of the HP security solutions. Prior to joining Fortify in 2009 and being acquired by HP, David ran Firewall and IPS marketing for the Security division of Nokia Corporation. In addition, he has held multiple positions in product marketing, product management, channel marketing and sales while working for Oracle, EMC, Legato, BMC Software and several start-ups.

Topic - Gray, the New Black: Gray-Box Vulnerability Testing

Over the years, two key techniques have emerged as the most effective for finding security vulnerabilities in software: Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and Static Application Security Testing (SAST). While DAST and SAST each possess unique strengths, the “Holy Grail” of security testing is thought to be “hybrid” – a technique that combines and correlates the results from both testing methods, maximizing the advantages of each. Until recently, however, a critical element has been missing from first generation hybrid solutions: information about the inner workings and behavior of applications undergoing DAST and SAST analysis. This presentation will introduce you to the next generation of hybrid security analysis – what it is, how it works, and the benefits it offers. It will also address (and dispel) the claims against hybrid, and leave you with a clear understanding of how the new generation of hybrid will enable organizations to resolve their most critical software security issues faster and more cost-effectively than any other available analysis technology.

March 8, 2012, with the Boston Security Meetup group

Location - JobSpring, Boylston St.

Topic - Corporate Espionage for Dummies: The Hidden Threat of Embedded Web Servers

Speaker - VP for Security Research at ZScaler, along with other speakers at the security meetup. Today, everything from kitchen appliances to television sets come with an IP address. Network connectivity for various hardware devices opens up exciting opportunities. Forgot to lower the thermostat before leaving the house? Simply access it online. Need to record a show? Start the DVR with a mobile app. While embedded web servers are now as common as digital displays in hardware devices, sadly, security is not. What if that same convenience exposed photocopied documents online or allowed outsiders to record your telephone conversations? A frightening thought indeed. Software vendors have been forced to climb the security learning curve. As independent researchers uncovered embarrassing vulnerabilities, vendors had little choice but to plug the holes and revamp development lifecycles to bake security into products. Vendors of embedded web servers have faced minimal scrutiny and as such are at least a decade behind when it comes to security practices. Today, network connected devices are regularly deployed with virtually no security whatsoever. The risk of insecure embedded web servers has been amplified by insecure networking practices. Every home and small business now runs a wireless network, but it was likely set up by someone with virtually no networking expertise. As such, many devices designed only for LAN access are now unintentionally Internet facing and wide open to attack from anyone, regardless of their location. Leveraging the power of cloud based services, Zscaler spent several months scanning large portions of the Internet to understand the scope of this threat. Our findings will make any business owner think twice before purchasing a 'wifi enabled' device. We'll share the results of our findings, reveal specific vulnerabilities in a multitude of appliances and discuss how embedded web servers will represent a target rich environment for years to come.

December 13, 2011, 6:30, Microsoft NERD, Cambridge, Horace Mann Room

Jeremiah Grossman – Founder and CTO WhiteHat Security Directions: http://microsoftcambridge.com/About/Directions/tabid/89/Default.aspx

September 14 2011

Dinis Cruz  -  OWASP O2 Platform

The O2 Platform is focused on automating application security knowledge and workflows. It is a library of scriptable objects specifically designed for developers and security consultants to be able to perform quick, effective and thorough source code-driven application security reviews (blackbox + whitebox).

September 7 2011

Adriel Desautels – Differences between Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Scanning

July 2011

Anurag Agarwal, the founder of MyAppSecurity

Session 1 - Managing Risk with Threat Modeling Threat Modeling can help by guiding the Application Development Teams to ensure your Security Policies get properly coded into the Applications at time of Development. By creating pre-approved methods of coding for your development teams, and applying them in a repeatable and scalable process, you can assist your development teams in building a secure application easily and effortlessly.

Session 2 - False Positive, False Negative and False Sense of Security This interactive session will talk about the pros and cons of using black box testing tools and discuss their effectiveness in building a mature software security program.

Thursday June 2

Location - Microsoft NERD - http://microsoftcambridge.com/About/Directions/tabid/89/Default.aspx

Topic - Bringing Sexy Back: Defensive Measures That Actually Work

Presenter - Paul Asadoorian, Founder &amp; CEO, PaulDotCom Enterprises

There is a plethora of information available on how to break into systems, steal information, and compromise users. As a penetration tester, I have performed testing on a regular basis that reveals severe security weaknesses in several organizations, and many of my peers have reported on the same. However, once you "own" the network and report on how you accomplished your goals, now what? Sure, we make defensive recommendations, but consistently it has been proven that security can be bypassed. Not enough focus is given to what works defensively. We have a lot of technology at our disposal: firewalls, intrusion detection, log correlation, but it provides little protection from today's threats and is often not implemented effectively. This talk will focus on taking an offensive look at defense. Applying techniques that are simple, yet break the mold of traditional defensive measures. We will explore setting up "traps" for attackers, slowing them down with simple scripts, using honeypots, planting bugs, and most importantly tying these methods to "enterprise security". This talk will also include real-world examples of the techniques in action from a live, heavily attacked site. Topics will include:


 * Using wireless “attacks” on the attackers
 * Implementing the Metasploit Decloak engine to find the attackers
 * Setting traps to detect web application attacks
 * Integrating results into your enterprise log management tool

The goal of this talk is to make defense “sexy”…

Presenter Bio

Paul Asadoorian is currently the "Product Evangelist" for Tenable Network Security, where he showcases vulnerability scanning and management through blogs, podcasts and videos. Paul is also the founder of PaulDotCom, an organization centered around the award winning "PaulDotCom Security Weekly" podcast that brings listeners the latest in security news, vulnerabilities, research and interviews with the security industry's finest. Paul has a background in penetration testing, intrusion detection, and is the co-author of "WRT54G Ultimate Hacking", a book dedicated to hacking Linksys routers.

Thursday May 26

Location - Microsoft Waltham (201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA)

Topic - OWASP Top 10 issue #4 – Insecure Direct Object Reference

Presenter - Jim Weiler, Sr. Mgr. Information Security, Starwood Hotels and President of OWASP Boston

Jim Weiler will discuss threat models, risks and various remediations of issue #4 in the 2010 OWASP Top 10 – Insecure Direct Object References.

Topic - A Web-Application Architecture for Regulatory Compliant Cloud Computing

Presenter - Arshad Noor, StrongAuth

The emergence of cloud-computing as an alternative deployment strategy for IT systems presents many opportunities, yet challenges traditional notions of data-security. The fact that data-security regulations are developing teeth, leaves information technology professionals perplexed on how to take advantage of cloud-computing while proving compliance to regulations for protecting sensitive information.

This presentation presents an architecture for building the next generation of web-applications. This architecture allows you to leverage emerging technologies such as cloud-computing, cloud-storage and enterprise key-management (EKM) to derive benefits such as lower costs, faster time-to-market and immense scalability with smaller investments - while proving compliance to PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH and similar data-security regulations.

Presenter Bio

Arshad Noor is the CTO of StrongAuth, Inc, a Silicon Vally-based company that specializes in enterprise key management. He is the designer and lead-developer of StrongKey, the industry's first open-source Symmetric Key Management System, and the KeyAppliance - the industry's first appliance combining encryption, tokenization, key-management and a cryptographic hardware module at an unprecedented value. He has written many papers and spoken at many forums on the subject of encryption and key-management over the years.

 CANCELLED  

Topic – Secure Application design and Coding -- CANCELLED

Presenter - Josh Abraham, Rapid 7

Speaker Bio 

April 2011

Ed Adams Security Innovation -- the new OWASP Exams Project and the work being done by the OWASP Academies Working Group

March 2011

Josh Abraham, Rapid 7

Owning the world, one mobile app at a time, and web services pen testing.

Febrary 2011

Rob Cheyne, CEO of Safelight Security -

Security Leadership series: Delivering a successful security presentation

December 2010

Application Architecture Security Assessment - Second session

Rob Cheyne, CEO SafeLight Security Advisors

November 2010

Open SAMM – Software Assurance Maturity Model

Shakeel Tufail is the Federal Practice Manager at Fortify, an HP company.

October 2010

Rob Cheyne, CEO SafeLight Security Advisors Overview: In this highly interactive two-part workshop, Rob Cheyne of Safelight Security will show you the basics of conducting a real-world architecture &amp; design review. This workshop draws from Safelight's Security Architecture Fundamentals training course, a two-day course frequently used to teach Fortune 500 companies how to look at their system architectures from both the hacker's and the designer’s point of view.

July 2010

Lightning Talk – Rob Cheyne, CEO Safelight Security Advisors In this installment of the Safelight lightning talks series, Rob will present the basics of a Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF).

Main Presentation - Drive-by Pharming with MonkeyFist

Joey Peloquin - Director of Application Security, Fishnet Security

June 2010

Rob Cheyne Lightning Talk - topic to be announced

Main Presentation - Ryan Barnett The Web Hacking Incident Database (WHID) is a Web Application Security Consortium project dedicated to maintaining a list of web applications related security incidents. Ryan Barnett is director of application security research at Breach Security where he leads Breach Security Labs.

May 2010

Rob Cheyne Lightning Talk - SQL Injection

Vinnie Liu - Data Exposure, New Approaches to Open Source Intelligence Techniques, and Incident Handling

April 2010

Dan Hestad Security Innovation Dan will be talking about his experiences with PCI and web applications, and answering questions about do's and don'ts of acceptable PCI practices in web applications.

March 2010

Zack Lanier - Disclosure Samsara, or "the endless vulnerability disclosure debate"

http://n0where.org/talks/samsara_20100310.html

http://n0where.org/talks/samsara_20100310.pdf (very large PDF)

February 2010

Rob Cheyne of Safelight Security Advisors; New Technology, Same Old Vulnerabilities

January 2010 at Microsoft NERD, Cambridge

Josh Abraham, Rapid 7 Technologies

December 2009

Eric Bender, Cenzic

November 2009

Jim Weiler, Sr. Mgr. Information Security, Starwood Hotels - Web Application Vulnerability Scanners

Mush Hakhinian, Leader, Application Security Practice, IntraLinks - Secure coding with no money down using SONAR: unleashing the power of open-source code analysis tools

October 2009

Paul Schofield, Senior Security Engineer, Imperva - From Rivals to BFF: WAF &amp; VA Unite

September 2009 at CORE Technologies, Boston

Paul Asadoorian, Pauldotcom.com

Alex Horan, CORE Security

May 2009

Joey Peloquin, Fishnet Security, Secure SDLC: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly presentation pdf

March 2009

Sabha Kazerooni, Security Compass - Exploit Me tools; Framework Level Threat Analysis

ExploitMe Document

Framework Level Threat Analysis document

Meeting Pizza Sponsor - Arcot

Arcot is a leader in online fraud prevention, strong authentication and eDocument security. Arcot's solutions are easily deployed, low-cost and extremely scalable, allowing organizations to transparently protect their users from fraud without changing user behavior or requiring expensive hardware.

Arcot can be contacted thru Michael Kreppein, michael.kreppein@arcot.com, 617-467-5200

December 2008

Brian Holyfield, Gothem Digital Science

Tamper Proofing Web Applications http://www.gdssecurity.com/l/b/2008/12/04/

June 2008

Jeremiah Grossman; Founder and CTO, Whitehat Security

Appetizer - Hacking Intranets from the Outside (Just when you thought your network was safe) Port scanning with JavaScript

Main Topic - Business Logic Flaws: How they put your Websites at Risk

March 2008

Chris Eng; Senior Director, Security Research, Veracode

Description – Attacking crypto in web applications

December 2007

Scott Matsumoto; Principal Consultant, Cigital

Description – You Say Tomayto and I Say Tomahto – Talking to Developers about Application Security

Cigital Presentation

November 2007

Tom Mulvehill Ounce Labs

Description – Tom will share his knowledge and expertise on implementing security into the software development life cycle. This presentation will cover how to bring practicality into secure software development. Several integration models will be explored as well as solutions for potential obstacles

Ounce presentation

October 2007

George Johnson, Principal Software Engineer EMC; CISSP

An Introduction to Threat Modeling.

September 2007

Day of Worldwide OWASP 1 day conferences on the topic "Privacy in the 21st Century"

June 2007

Tool Talk - Jim Weiler - WebGoat and Crosssite Request Forgeries

Danny Allan; Director, Security Research, Watchfire

Topic: Exploitation of the OWASP Top 10: Attacks and Strategies

March 2007

Jeremiah Grossman, CTO Whitehat Security: Top 10 Web Application Hacks of 2006

January 2007

Dave Low, RSA the Security Division of EMC: encryption case studies

November 2006

September 2006

Mike Gavin, Forrester Research: Web Application Firewalls

June 2006

Imperva - Application and Database Vulnerabilities and Intrusion Prevention

Jim Weiler - Using Paros Proxy Server as a Web Application Vulnerability tool

May 2006

April 2006

Dennis Hurst; SPI Dynamics: A study of AJAX Hacking

Jim Weiler; OWASP Boston: Using Paros HTTP proxy, part 1. first meeting with all demos, no powerpoints!

March 2006

Mateo Meucci; OWASP Italy Anatomy of 2 web attacks

Tom Stracener; Cenzic Web Application Vulnerabilities

February 2006

Ron Ben Natan; Guardium CTO Database Security: Protecting Identity Information at the Source

January 2006

David Low, Senior Field Engineer: RSA Practical Encryption

December 2005

Paul Galwas, Product Manager: nCipher Enigma variations: Key Management controlled

November 2005

Robert Hurlbut, Independent Consultant Threat Modeling for web applications

October 2005

Prateek Mishra, Ph.D. Director, Security Standards and Strategy: Oracle Corp Chaiman of the OASIS Security Services (SAML) Technical Committee - Identity Federation : Prospects and Challenges

Ryan Shorter, Sr. System Engineer: Netcontinuum - Application Security Gateways

September 2005

Dr. Herbert Thompson, Chief Security Strategist: SecurityInnovation - How to Break Software Security

July 2005

Mark O'Neill, CTO: Vordel - [http://www.owasp.org/docroot/owasp/misc/MarkOneill.pdf Giving SOAP a REST? A look at the intersection of Web Application Security and Web Services Security]

June 2005

Arian Evans, National Practice Lead, Senior Security Engineer: Fishnet Security Overview of Application Security Tools

May 2005

Patrick Hynds, CTO: Critical Sites - Passwords - Keys to the Kingdom

April 2005

Jonathan Levin - Of Random Numbers

Jothy Rosenberg, Founder and CTO: Service Integrity - Web Services Security

March 2005

Joe Stagner: Microsoft Let's talk about Application Security

Feb 2005

Application Security Inc. PowerPoint slides for the Anatomy of a Database Attack.

Local Chapter Information
To find out more about the Boston chapter, just join the OWASP Boston mailing list.

The chapter shipping/mailing address is:

OWASP Boston 35 Wachusett Dr Lexington, MA 02421

Links
Reviews of security podcasts

Boston Application Security Conference 2012

Boston Application Security Conference 2011

Boston Application Security Conference 2010

Boston OWASP Chapter Leaders
President

- [mailto:jim.weiler@owasp.org Jim Weiler] 781 356 0067

Board of Directors


 * Linda Leigh Aberdale
 * Mark Arnold
 * [mailto:tom.conner@owasp.org Tom Conner]
 * Mike Perez
 * [mailto:roy.wattanasin@owasp.org Roy Wattanasin]