7 Black Hat Sessions Sure To Cause A Stir
At Black Hat, researchers will point out the weaknesses in everything from the satellites in outer space to the thermostat in your home.
July 22, 2014
(Source: NASA)
The Speaker: Ruben Santamarta, principal security consultant for IOActive
The Research: Santamarta plans to go deep with this one, dishing on the technical details of how his firm conducted reverse engineering on the type of satellite communications devices used by ships, aircraft, military, emergency services, and industrial infrastructure like oil rigs and gas pipelines. All the devices his team looked at were riddled with backdoors, hard-coded credentials, insecure protocols, and weak encryption algorithms. The bottom line was that they were open to full compromise by remote, unauthenticated attackers, sometimes with no user interaction required.
Andres Riancho, application security researcher and founder of Bonsai Information Security
The Research: Riancho plans to go into great length about how to use cloud-specific vulnerabilities and weaknesses to move from zero access to full root on an AWS account. He'll also release the toolset he developed for this research, which will give users the ability to enumerate access to AWS services, to take advantage of poorly configured identity access management roles to create new users, and to extract credentials from metadata files, among other actions.
(Source: Google)
The Speakers: Xinwen Fu, associate professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; Qinggang Yue, PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; and Zhen Ling, former visiting PhD research student at the University of Victoria
The Research: This trio will unveil details of research that shows how it is possible to use a camera such as the one in Google Glass to record users tapping passcodes on any touch screen and recognize those passcodes 90% of the time from as far as almost 10 feet away. They will show how they developed the analytics engine to achieve those results, and they will offer some countermeasures for users to protect themselves.
(Source: Square)
The Speakers: Nils and Jon Butler, security researchers for MWR Labs
The Research: For this talk, Nils and Butler took a close look at the weaknesses of mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) systems that have been all the rage in the SMB community over the last several years. They'll detail a number of vulnerabilities that gave them code execution of the devices, and they will demo a number of attack methods, including a malicious credit card that leaves a remote root on the mPOS device.
The parties, the meet-and-greets with industry friends, and electricity of like minds converging in Vegas summertime heat may provide the glitz and allure of the annual Black Hat security convention, but it is the research that fuels this conference's staying power.
The intellectual heart and soul of Black Hat, the briefing sessions always stir up fresh controversy and food for thought within the security research community and beyond. Whether it's been hacked ATMs spewing money from the podium, demonstrations of enterprise financial systems completely compromised, or any number of exposed vulnerabilities that have left vendors in a tizzy, Black Hat has always offered a venue for controversial research to take center stage.
This year will likely prove no different, with plenty of speakers gearing up for some powerful talks in just a couple of week. Here are some of our picks for those pieces of research most likely to set tongues wagging.
(Source: Nest Labs)
The Speakers: Yier Jin, assistant professor at the University of Central Florida; Grant Hernandez, undergraduate security researcher at the University of Central Florida; and Daniel Buentello, senior security researcher at Cimation
The Research: This group of researchers is taking the gloves off for this demonstration, showing how a custom compiled kernel loaded into a USB stick could achieve full compromise of the Nest home automation device within 15 seconds. The proof of concept would bypass many of the firmware protections built into Nest and could give remote attackers the power to monitor user behavior and potentially further introduce rootkits and other rogue services on the local network to which a Nest device connects.
Pili Hu, PhD candidate at Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Wing Cheong Lau, associate professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Research: This pair of researchers plan to hit the podium and dish the details on a proof of concept they ran against OAuth 2.0 to demonstrate wide-scale data leakage by the authentication protocol in online social network implementations. The demonstration had the pair create a crawler that was able to collect information about 100 million users on a social media site within a week and a scant $150 investment in AWS compute power.
Pili Hu, PhD candidate at Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Wing Cheong Lau, associate professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Research: This pair of researchers plan to hit the podium and dish the details on a proof of concept they ran against OAuth 2.0 to demonstrate wide-scale data leakage by the authentication protocol in online social network implementations. The demonstration had the pair create a crawler that was able to collect information about 100 million users on a social media site within a week and a scant $150 investment in AWS compute power.
(Source: NASA)
The Speaker: Ruben Santamarta, principal security consultant for IOActive
The Research: Santamarta plans to go deep with this one, dishing on the technical details of how his firm conducted reverse engineering on the type of satellite communications devices used by ships, aircraft, military, emergency services, and industrial infrastructure like oil rigs and gas pipelines. All the devices his team looked at were riddled with backdoors, hard-coded credentials, insecure protocols, and weak encryption algorithms. The bottom line was that they were open to full compromise by remote, unauthenticated attackers, sometimes with no user interaction required.
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