Royal Holloway

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Everyone is welcome to join us at our chapter meetings.

Thursday, March 8th 2012 (Royal Holloway)
Location: Royal Holloway University of London, Bourne Lecture Theatre 2, Egham Hill, Egham, TW20 0EX

Speakers: Tobias Gondrom, Viet Pham


 * "Securing the SSL channel against man-in-the-middle attacks: Future technologies - HTTP Strict Transport Security and and Pinning of Certs" - Tobias Gondrom

- In the recent months major trusted CAs providing trusted certificates for SSL/TLS in browser scenarios were compromised (e.g. seen in the Diginotar breach) and based on the current trust models (trusting all registered CAs equally for all domains) exposed vital web applications to the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks. Several approaches are currently discussed to mitigate this risk. The most advanced and closest to final adoption being the technologies discussed by the browser vendors at the recent IETF meeting in November in Taipei: HSTS and pinning of certificates. To better protect content providers against the distribution of bogus certificates, an HTTP header extension containing a fingerprint of their certificates linked to a domain address has been defined. This approach, which has been partly tested in Chrome, and already helped identify and protect to some extend Google's web application in the recent Diginotar compromise. Chrome users were able to detect the bogus DigiNotar certificates because Chrome had embedded the hashes of valid Google certificates. Back in July, the hacked DigiNotar certificate authority (CA), which has since gone out of business, was used to issue more than five hundred bogus certificates for companies including Google and various intelligence services.

- Abstract: Cryptography is being widely implemented in software to provide security features. The main reason is that, many cryptographic mechanisms are mathematically proven secure, or trusted secure given some mathematical reasoning. However, to take full advantages of these mechanisms, they must be implemented strictly according to the theoretical models, e.g., several cryptographic mechanisms must be used together, in a specific manner to provide a desired security goal. However, without strong cryptographic background, many software developers tend to deviate from these models, thus making their own security software a gold mine for attackers. This talk gives examples to show why such situations exist, where do they spread, and how bad they may turn into.
 * "Implementing cryptography: good theory vs. bad practice" - Viet Pham

Thursday, February 2nd 2012 ,18:30-21:00
Location: Royal Holloway University of London, Bourne Lecture Theatre 2, Egham Hill, Egham, TW20 0EX

Speakers: Sarah Baso, Dinis Cruz, Dennis Groves


 * Security as Pollution (lessons learned) - Dinis Cruz
 * Based on David Rice's "Upon the Threshold of Opportunity" presentation at the OWASP AppSec USA 2010


 * Making Security Invisible by Becoming the Developer's Best Friends - Dinis Cruz
 * Based on Dinis' presentation at OWASP AppSec Brazil 2011


 * How to get a job in AppSec by Hacking and fixing TeamMentor - Dinis Cruz and Dennis Groves
 * This is for students and developers who want to get into the application security space and need to have/show real-world experience.


 * What's Happening on OWASP Today - Sarah Baso
 * This is an overview of the multiple activities that are currently happening around the world at OWASP presented by one of OWASP's employees currently focused on logistics, community and empowerment

Thursday, September 8th 2011
Location: Royal Holloway University of London, Bourne Lecture Theatre 2, Egham Hill, Egham, TW20 0EX

Speaker: Daniel Cuthbert (deck)

Title: Doing it for the Lulz: Why Lulzsec has shown us to be an ineffective industry.

Bio: Daniel Cuthbert is one of the Open Web Application Security Project Leaders and the Assessment manager for SensePost. He has been researching, and involved, with web application security since the late 90’s and has worked on a wide range of projects to ensure that the development life cycle is secure and the overall application can withstand today’s hackers.

Directions to Royal Holloway and a Campus Plan are available from the following website (Bourne LT 2 is in building 31 on the Campus Plan).

Friday, June 3rd 2011
Location: Royal Holloway University of London, Room BLT2, Egham Hill, Egham, TW20 0EX


 * Wordpress Security - Steve Lord ([[Media:Wordpress-security-ext.pdf|PDF]])
 * Wordpress is one if the most popular blogging systems in the world but is routinely used to shoehorn complex sites into a blog shaped box, often because of it's flexibility and ease of use. In this talk, Mandalorian's Steve Lord discusses common Wordpress security snafus and how to avoid them.