Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2006 [audio] Presentations From The Security Conference

"Runtime packers are a widely-used technique in malware today. Virtually every Win32 malware added to the WildList as well as ad- and spyware is packed with one or another runtime packer. Not only can they turn older malware into new threats again, but they might also prevent AV vendors from using more generic approaches and therefore requiring more work, which possibly generates more errors or broken updates, unless the product is able to handle all the different runtime packers out there. Yet, there aren't any comprehensive tests of runtime packer capabilities in AV products so far. We use a testset of more than 3000 runtime-packed files (with different packers, versions, compression options) to determine how well-equipped today's AV software is in dealing with these types of threats. In this presentation, we'll not only discuss the aspects of handling and detecting runtime packed malware, but also have a look into other problems that come along. These include false positives, crashes and the very slow s

The times of designing security software as a matter of functional design are over. Positive security functional requirements do not make secure software. Think risk driven design, think like an attacker, think about negative scenarios during the early stages of the application development from misuse and abuse cases during inception, to threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures during elaboration, secure coding during construction and secure testing and penetration testing during transition to the production phase. The short turbo talk objective is not to cover the academics of secure software, but to talk about a business case where software security practices and methodologies are successfully built into software produced by a very large financial institution. Both strategic and tactical approaches to software security are presented and artifacts that support a secure software development methodology. The critical link between technical and business risk management is proven along with business factors

"Tony Chor will discuss Microsoft’s security engineering methodology and how it is being applied to the development of Internet Explorer 7. He will detail key vulnerabilities and attacks this methodology revealed as well as how the new version of IE will mitigate those threats with unique features such as the Phishing Filter and Protected Mode. Rob Franco lives to make browsing safer for internet users. Rob led Security improvements in Internet Explorer for Windows Server 2003, Windows XP SP2, and IE 7. Prior to that, Rob worked on Corporate deployment features such as Group Policy and the Internet Explorer Administration Kit. When he’s not working, he can usually be found cycling around the Seattle area or boating on a nearby lake."

"The premise of the demonstration is there are no secure systems. Traffic that may have malicious intent, but has not yet caused problems in any published occurrences, may reach protected services and clients after passing through edge equipment and inline IPS devices. This traffic should be sent to closely-monitored virtual machines hosting mirrors of the real services that are segregated from the primary services on the network. These virtual hosts will be the service utilized by certain types of network traffic that may have malicious intent. The purpose of sending potentially malicious traffic to the virtual services is to gain insight into the nature of the potential attack and spare the real services, thus creating an improved risk management model for the deployment of network services that are exposed to the possibility of attack scenarios. However, it is probable that in most cases, the traffic will cause no harm to the virtual system and allow the remote user access to a most likely minimal version

"The presentation will first present how to generically (i.e. not relaying on any implementation bug) insert arbitrary code into the latest Vista Beta 2 kernel (x64 edition), thus effectively bypassing the (in)famous Vista policy for allowing only digitally singed code to be loaded into kernel. The presented attack does not requite system reboot. Next, the new technology for creating stealth malware, code-named Blue Pill, will be presented. Blue Pill utilizes the latest virtualization technology from AMD - Pacifica - to achieve unprecedented stealth. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate that is possible (or soon will be) to create an undetectable malware which is not based on a concept, but, similarly to modern cryptography, on the strength of the 'algorithm'. Joanna Rutkowska has been involved in computer security research for several years. She has been fascinated by the internals of operating systems since she was in primary school and started learning x86 assembler on MS-DOS. Soon after she switch

"This talk will go in-depth into methods for breaking crypto faster using FPGAs. FPGA's are chips that have millions of gates that can be programmed and connected arbitrarily to perform any sort of task. Their inherent structure provides a perfect environment for running a variety of crypto algorithms and do so at speeds much faster than a conventional PC. A handful of new FPGA crypto projects will be presented and will demonstrate how many algorithms can be broken much faster than people really think, and in most cases, extremely inexpensively. Breaking WPA-PSK is possible with coWPAtty, but trying to do so onsite can be time consuming and boring. All that waiting around for things to be computed each and every time we want to check for dumb and default passwords. Well, we're impatient and like to know the password NOW! Josh Wright has recently added support for pre-computed tables to coWPAtty-but how do you create a good set of tables and not have it take 70 billion years? David Hulton has implemented th

"Worms traditionally propagate by exploiting a vulnerability in an OS or an underlying service. 2005 saw the release in the wild of the first worms that propagate by exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications served by simple http daemons. With the near ubiquity of W3C compliant web browsers and advances in dynamic content generation and client-side technologies like AJAX, major players like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are creating powerful application accessible only through web browsers. The security risks of web applications are already largely neglected. The discovery of programs that automatically exploit web applications and self-replicate will only make the situation worse. This presentation will analyze the scope of these new threats. First we will examine how Web Worms and Viruses operate, specifically focusing on propagation methods, execution paths, payload threats and limitations, and design features. Next we will autopsy the source code of the Perl.Sanity worm and the MySpace.com virus to

"Web apps continue to be the soft, white underbelly of most corporate IT environments. While the optimal path is to fix your code, it's not always an option, especially for closed-source, black-box web apps or apps hosted on servers that you can't harden directly. If you have an app in your data center that your CIO thinks is the greatest thing since Microsoft Golf, but is really the HTTP equivalent of a big flashing "own me" sign, this talk is for you. We'll walk through the process of configuring a caching, content filtering / scanning (POST/GET/header/HTML/XHTML/XML) and traffic sanitizing / rewriting front end HTTP gateway that also tries to frustrate web scans and HTTP fingerprinting. I'm releasing some build scripts to do most of the heavy lifting as well."

"Automated identification of malicious code and subsequent classification into known malware families can help cut down laborious manual malware analysis time. Call sequence, assembly instruction statistics and graph topology all say something about the code. This talk will present three identification and classification approaches that use methods and results from complex network theory. Some familiarity with assembly, Win32 architecture, statistics and basic graph theory is helpful. Daniel Bilar is an academic researcher who enjoys poking his nose in code and networks and trying novel ways to solve problems. He has degrees from Brown University (BA, Computer Science), Cornell University (MEng, Operations Research and Industrial Engineering) and Dartmouth College (PhD, Engineering Sciences). Dartmouth College filed a provisional patent for his PhD thesis work ("Quantitative Risk Analysis of Computer Networks", Prof. G. Cybenko advisor), which addresses the problem of risk opacity of software on wired and

"Looking for instant gratification from the latest client side attack? Your search may be over when you see the data that can be harvested from popular web browser caches. This discussion will focus on what web application programmers are NOT doing to prevent data like credit card and social security numbers from being cached. It will explore what popular websites are not disabling these features and what tools an attacker can use to gather this information from a compromised machine. A general overview of web browser caching will be included and countermeasures from both the client and server side. Corey Benninger, CISSP, is a Security Consultant with Foundstone, a division of McAfee, where he commonly performs web application assessments for leading financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies. He also is involved with teaching Ultimate Hacking Exposed courses to clients throughout the United States. Prior to joining Foundstone, Corey worked on developing web applications for a nation wide medical tr

"In the first half of this session, Paul Simmonds will present on behalf of the Jericho Forum taking participants through the initial problem statement and what people need to go away and start implementing. Topics will include: 1. De-perimeterization - the business imperative 2. From protocols to accessing the web - the technical issues 3. What should be implemented today - current and near term solutions 4. Planning for tomorrow - future solutions and roadmap The second half on this session will focus on the Jericho Challenge, the format, the rules, the judging format and the prizes followed by a Q&A. The aim with the Jericho Form Challenge is to develop a "technology demonstrator" with a full year from start to finish. The competition is based on a typical business environment with at least one business application, one legacy application, typical business usage (Web, E-mail and Word Processing) using at least one "office" PC and one laptop. The finals and judging will occur in 2007.

"All applications and operating systems have coding errors and we have seen technical advances both in attack and mitigation sophistication as more security vulnerabilities are exploiting defects related to application and OS memory and heap usage. Starting with W2k3 and XP/SP2, Windows incorporated technologies to reduce the reliability of such attacks. The heap manager in Windows Vista pushes the innovation much further in this area. This talk will describe the challenges the heap team faced and the technical details of the changes coming in Windows Vista. Adrian Marinescu, development lead in the Windows Kernel group, has been with Microsoft Corporation since 1998. He joined then to work on few core components such as user-mode memory management, kernel object management and the kernel inter-process communication mechanism. In the heap management area, Adrian designed and implemented the Low Fragmentation Heap, a highly scalable addition to the Windows Heap Manager, and he currently focuses on technique

"Technologies emerge on a regular basis with new promises of better security. This is more or less true. However we know there are still weaknesses and that 100% security is not realistic. Therefore the real need when deploying a new security device is to know its limits. IPS are part of those new technologies. They are oversold by marketing speeches and promises of an absolute security. Guess what? This is not exactly the truth.... The purpose of this speech is not to discredit IPS but to help in understanding the limits of technologies that are involved. We will particularly focus on the following subjects: * conceptual weaknesses and ways to detect "transparent" inline equipments * signatures issues * hardware architecture limitations and common jokes * performance vs security necessary trade-off and consequences * behavioral, heuristics, neuronal stuff etc. reality and limitations Through examples, proofs of concept and test beds results we should provide a broad view of

"Usually, a personal firewall and an antivirus monitor are the only tools run by a user to protect the system from any malware threat with any level of sophistication. This level significantly increases when malware authors add kernel mode rootkit components to their code in order to avoid easy detection. As rootkit technologies become more and more popular, we can clearly see that many AV vendors begin to integrate anti-rootkit code into their products. However, the firewall evolution is not so obvious. Firewall vendors widely advertise their enhancements to the protection against user mode code injections and similar tricks, which are used by almost any malware out there to bypass more simple firewalls, keeping much less attention to the kernel mode threats. In fact, just a few vendors evolve their kernel mode traffic filter techniques to pose an obstacle for a possible kernel rootkit. This presentation will focus on the attacks which may be performed by an NT kernel rootkit to bypass a personal firewall

"Printers, scanners, and copiers still have a reputation of being embedded systems or appliances; dumb machines that perform a specific, repetitive function. Today's devices are far different than their predecessors, but still do not receive the same level of security scrutiny as servers, workstations, routers, or even switches. The goal of this talk is to change the way we look at these devices, and leave the audience with a better awareness of the security implications of having these devices in their environments. Although the concepts in this talk can apply to many different devices, the primary focus will be on vulnerabilities, exploitation, and defense of the new Xerox WorkCentre product line. Previously undisclosed vulnerabilities will be released, along with exploit code that turns a dumb printer, copier, or scanner into a network attack drone. Steps administrators can take to harden these devices will also be covered. Brendan O'Connor is a security engineer from the Midwest. He worked in security

"Social networking sites such as MySpace have recently been the target of XSS attacks, most notably the "samy is my hero" incident in late 2005. XSS affects a wide variety of sites and back end web technologies, but there are perhaps no more interesting targets than massively popular sites with viral user acquisition growth curves, which allow for exponential XSS worm propagation, as seen in samy's hack. Combine the power of reaching a wide and ever-widening audience with browser exploits (based on the most common browsers with such a broad "normal person" user base) that can affect more than just the browser as we saw with WMF, a insertion and infection method based on transparent XSS, and payloads which can themselves round-trip the exploit code back into the same or other vulnerable sites, and you have a self-healing distributed worm propagation platform with extremely accelerated infection vectors. We investigate the possibilities using MySpace and other popular sites as case studies, along with the po

"To be able to defend against IT security attacks, one has to understand the attack patterns and henceforth the vulnerabilities of the attached devices. But, for an in-depth risk analysis, pure technical knowledge of the properties of a vulnerability is not sufficient: one has to understand how vulnerabilities, exploitation, remediation, and distribution of information thereof is handled by the industry and the networking community. In the research, we examined how vulnerabilities are handled in large-scale by analyzing 80,000+ security advisories published since 1995. This huge amount of information enables us to identify and quantify the performance of the security and software industry. We discover trends and discuss their implications. Based on the findings, we finally propose a measure for the global risk exposure. Content may be reviewed after the start of the conference."

There is a growing need to develop improved methods for discovering vulnerabilities in closed-source software. The tools and techniques used to automate searching for these vulnerabilities are either incomplete or non-existent. Fuzz-testing is a common technique used in the discovery process but does not provide a complete analysis of all the vulnerabilities which may exist. Other techniques, such as API hooking, are used to monitor insecure imported functions while leaving inlined functions still waiting to be found. LEVI is a new vulnerability auditing tool (Windows NT Family) which addresses both of these issues by using a code integration-based technique to monitor both imported and inlined functions. Using this approach provides a more complete analysis of the vulnerabilities hidden within closed-source software.

"Wireless stealth was somewhat expensive some years ago as we were required to use proprietary radios and so on… Thanks to increasingly flexible low-cost 802.11 chipsets we are now able to encode any MAC layer proprietary protocol over 2.4 GHz/5 GHz bands! This could mean stealth to everybody at low-cost! This presentation will focus on two techniques to achieve a good level of stealth: * a userland technique exploiting a covert channel over valid 802.11 frames; * a driverland technique exploiting some 802.11 protocol tweaks. These techniques are somewhat weird! That’s one reason they resist the action of scanners and wireless IDS! The tools that will be released are proof-of-concepts and may be improved both in terms of features and code cleanups!"

Technology vendors, security researchers, and customers - all sides of the vulnerability disclosure debate agree that working together rather than apart is the best way to secure our information. But how? This working group will bring all parties together in one room to address the issues and develop a beneficial working relationship extending beyond the conference.