Day 2 had a complete web app sec track. This is a huge change from last year, where there was like … my talk and that was about it. And you know what? It was full! Every session I’ve attended so far today has been near full. Plus, it’s top material.
Let’s get on with the details.
Hacking Intranet Websites from the Outside “JavaScript malware just got a lot more dangerous”
Jeremiah Grossman & TC Niedzialkowski
The Register missed the boat – they went to the wrong talk. They should have gone to this talk instead.
Jeremiah and TC showed a bunch of demos which totally 0wned the browser of the victim. This talk was downright scary. They did a basic CSRF attack against a DSL router (incidentally, the model I have at home – luckily I *have* changed the default password), and demo’d the ability to make the victim’s browser the attacker’s complete biatch.
Essentially, you can do two things:
a) don’t go to any sites
b) turn off the Internet
They didn’t even use the Ajax stuff which is now possible, such as using cross-domain XHR and Flash based arbitrary header re-writes and forgery, which when taken together essentially mean that an attacker has an extremely wide array of vulnerable sites, such as MySpace and others, to send hostile code to your computer to do with as they please. I am certain this is how the malicious mofos behind commercial / organized crime spamming and bot nets will try to infect millions of boxes over the next few years.
Ajax talks
These two talks were interesting, but didn’t extend the state of the art much beyond where I was back in February. All of the next three talks had overlapping content, which got a bit monotonous by the end.
“AJAX (in)security”
Billy Hoffman
Billy talked about four areas of Ajax security, but my favorite was how he extended the method of using mash ups to be evil via the mash up proxy and hide where you’re from. That’s cool. Billy did go a little bit further with an idea to use Ajax to create a proper worm, but used the ol’ MySpace worm and the Yahoo mail worm to show previous examples.
Billy’s talk was energetic and he talked at a thousand miles an hour. He could have done with some demos. I had a chat with him before the talk, and I think there’s some potential there to collaborate on future stuff.
“Breaking AJAX Web Applications: Vulns 2.0 in Web 2.0”
Alex Stamos & Zane Lackey
With Ajax stuff, it is necessary to bootstrap the audience … this year. The guys went through the basics of Ajax … again … and then went on to talk about the problems as they saw them. Again, not much new here, but at least there was a look at different frameworks, particularly Java based frameworks. I’ve mostly looked at PHP frameworks, so this was pretty interesting.
The guys ran out of time, and so didn’t talk long enough about the methods to prevent attacks. It’s not hard for the main part, but too little detail doesn’t help the BlackHat audience (who are mainly security geeks at larger corporations) who want to know the problem … and the solution. At DefCon, you don’t have to worry about the solution as they’re just interested in the problem.
“Six Degrees of XSSploitation”
Dan Moniz & HD Moore
This talk was interesting as HD Moore and Dan Moniz are relatively (in-) famous. However, it was a fairly lightweight presentation, again introducing XSS and Ajax and the MySpace worm. There was some good material in here, potentially looking at things you can do once you’ve found yourself a nice juicy XSS.
I would have liked to hear more about the ActiveX null pointer execution thing that is apparently coming out next week, but obviously that one is under NDA. HD took a back seat to Dan most of the time, but that’s okay – they imparted a lot of information in not much time.
“Analysis of Web Application Worms and Viruses”
Billy Hoffman
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