3 Briefings That Highlight Infosec's High-Stakes Game

Black Hat is home to talks both big and small. All are interesting, and technically compelling -- that goes without saying. But every year we have a few sessions, that, well, they're the ones that give us nervous butterflies when we ponder their implications. Today we're highlighting a high-powered trio of Briefings and Workshops that illustrate the high stakes of the infosec game. Spectacular exploits and worrying implications await.

BLACK HAT 2013
Articles leading up to and live coverage from Black Hat USA 2013, July 27 - Aug. 1.

Practical crypto exploits have exploded over the past couple of years, surprising the general infosec community despite the exploits being based on known weaknesses previously identified by crypto researchers. Help avoid a repeat by coming to "The Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Cryptopocalypse," in which Alex Stamos and colleagues will walk you through recent breakthroughs in discrete mathematics and their potential for undermining our trust in basic asymmetric primitives, including RSA. Then they'll talk doomsday: What happens the day after RSA is broken, and how can security work in a post-RSA world?

Prepare for a knockdown, drag-out Briefing in "Stepping P3wns: Adventures in Full-Spectrum Embedded Exploitation (and Defense!)." To start, the presenters will demo a nasty proof-of-concept worm, featuring at least one 0-day Cisco IP phone vuln, that can gain access to a network via multiple remote initial attack vectors and use other embedded devices as stepping stones to compromise a significant portion of infrastructure, paving the way for fully autonomous reconnaissance. Once you catch your breath, they'll deploy the Symbiote, a host-based defense for proprietary embedded systems, and repeat the attacks from the first half, showing Symbiote's potent real-time detection, alert, and mitigation capabilities. Fireworks, folks.

Finally, the blows keep coming for embedded devices in the Workshop "Embedded Devices Security and Firmware Reverse Engineering." Embedded devices are proliferating in networks from the enterprise to the home, and with those numbers come greatly increased security risks. In fact, they are increasingly the Achilles' heel of infrastructure security. This Workshop will delve into the workings of embedded device firmware and teach you how to inspect them from a security standpoint, with exercises on real firmware illustrating the material. It's hard work, but someone's gotta do it (the vendors sure aren't).

Less than 10 days till the show! Be sure to hit us up on social media to share your last-minute jitters.