Archive for August 7th, 2014

DEFCON 22: 0 day notes (part 2)

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

So what’s happening on Friday?

Domain Name Problems and Solutions” intrigues me the most in the first block, since a) it looks like this is going to involve DNS based attacks on spam, and II) Paul Vixie is one of the key figures in the development of DNS.

USB for all!” sounds like an interesting talk: “We will demonstrate different tools and methods that can be used to monitor and abuse USB for malicious purposes.”

I would have to go to “From root to SPECIAL: Pwning IBM Mainframes” just because I have a close friend (and former IBM-er) who speaks IBM mainframe. Plus, I’m curious. But “ShareEnum: We Wrapped Samba So You Don’t Have To” would be a good second choice: “ShareEnum uses the underlying Samba client libraries to list shares, permissions, and even recurse down file trees gathering information including what is stored in each directory.” And “Stolen Data Markets An Economic and Organizational Assessment” could be interesting as well. I’d probably still hit the IBM talk and seek out the slides for the other two.

More than likely I’d take a break at 13:00 and look at the slides for “Bypass firewalls, application white lists, secure remote desktops under 20 seconds” and “Investigating PowerShell Attacks” later. At 14:00, “What the Watchers See: Eavesdropping on Municipal Mesh Cameras for Giggles (or Pure Evil)“: “…we decode the previously undocumented mesh protocol enough to (1) “tune in” to live feeds from the various cameras positioned across the city, just like we were in police headquarters, and (2) inject arbitrary video into these streams.”

Am I Being Spied On? Low-tech Ways Of Detecting High-tech Surveillance” sounds like the best talk at 15:00. And after that, there’s nothing that really intrigues me on Friday.

Hack All The Things: 20 Devices in 45 Minutes” seems like the best opening panel on Saturday: if you don’t like what you’re seeing, just wait and something else will be along shortly. Plus free hardware!

There’s nothing that leaps out at me until “Secure Random by Default” at 13:00. Because Dan Kaminsky. “PropLANE: Kind of keeping the NSA from watching you pee” would be a good fallback if Kaminsky is too crowded: “…we’ve combined two things every good hacker should have, a Propeller powered DEF CON badge (DC XX in our case) and a somewhat sober brain to turn the DC badge (with some modifications) into an inline network encryption device.” (And hey: I have a DC 20 badge!)

“Secure Random” runs until 15:00, but if I couldn’t get into that, “NinjaTV – Increasing Your Smart TV’s IQ Without Bricking It” would be my second choice in the 14:00 block.

A Survey of Remote Automotive Attack Surfaces” is at 15:00. This is another Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek talk, and is already getting some press: I kind of want to see this, but, again, there’s a conflict with two other talks I’d also like to see: “VoIP Wars: Attack of the Cisco Phones” and “Detecting Bluetooth Surveillance Systems“. This is another case where I’d apologize profusely to Mr. Miller and Mr. Valasek, download a copy of their presentation, and hit one of the other two sessions.

Manna from Heaven: Improving the state of wireless rogue AP attacks” sounds interesting, especially with the promise of “a new rogue access point toolkit”. But I just can’t pass up the promise of “Learn how to control every room at a luxury hotel remotely“.

Attacking the Internet of Things using Time“, which is really about timing attacks, sounds more interesting than the title implies. And “Old Skewl Hacking: Porn Free!” sounds like a great way to wrap up the day.

I don’t know that there’s anything I care that much about Sunday morning, though “Burner Phone DDOS 2 dollars a day : 70 Calls a Minute” and “Optical Surgery; Implanting a DropCam” could be interesting if I was up at that time. “NSA Playset : GSM Sniffing” sounds a bit more interesting: “Introducing TWILIGHTVEGETABLE, our attempt to pull together the past decade of GSM attacks into a single, coherent toolset, and finally make real, practical, GSM sniffing to the masses.”

There’s a gap in stuff I want to see from 13:00 to 15:00. At 15:00, we have “Elevator Hacking – From the Pit to the Penthouse“. I confess to a great deal of curiosity about elevators and how they work. Plus: Deviant Ollam! And that takes us to the closing ceremonies at 16:30.

Tomorrow, I’ll start trying to put up links.

Classic Austin cliches.

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

Anyone who’s spent time in Austin is familiar with the complaint that too many Austin residents like to sit around and talk about how things were so much better when the Armadillo World Headquarters was in business, and how they saw Shiva’s Headband there, and rent was only $25 a month, and there was no traffic and abundant dope and and and…

The official name was Armadillo World Headquarters. But anyone who enjoyed live music just called it the ‘Dillo.

Yep. That’s your Statesman.

DEFCON 22: 0 day notes (part 1)

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

DEFCON 22 sort of fires up today, though the real action doesn’t begin until Friday.

I’m not in Vegas again this year, for boring (money) reasons. Frankly, I’m also feeling a little burnt out. I miss Vegas (well, mostly, I miss Lotus of Siam) but I’m not sure I really miss dealing with that many people crammed into that small a space. I’m also not so sure that what happens at the conference makes that much of a difference any more. It seems like, to borrow the words of another better writer, “Nothing works and nobody cares”.

Or maybe that’s the depression talking. And the fact that my current employer made all of the videos from last year’s DEFCON available internally within a week of the conference.

So. If I was at DEFCON, what would I be attending?

As I said earlier, Thursday is usually kind of slow. I suspect I’d go to the “Data Protection 101 – Successes, Fails, and Fixes” talk; it sounds kind of basic to me, but you never know what you might learn. “Practical Foxhunting 101” also intrigues me. I went transmitter hunting with a friend of mine many many years ago, and I maintain a somewhat more than academic interest in the subject.

Paging SDR… Why should the NSA have all the fun?” sounds like fun. Basically, this appears to be “how to decode pager traffic with cheap hardware so you can pretend to be Lester Freamon for fun and profit”. On the other hand, this conflicts with “RF Penetration Testing, Your Air Stinks“, a how-to talk for radio frequency penetration testers. I suspect I’d go to this one, and grab the slides from the pager talk later.

I know SCADA and the cloud are hot topics, but I’m not sure I’d go to either “AWS for Hackers” or “Protecting SCADA From the Ground Up“, simply because neither topic interests me that much. Nothing personal, presenters; they just don’t turn my crank.

I like the idea behind “Anatomy of a Pentest; Poppin’ Boxes like a Pro” and would be more likely to hit that than “One Man Shop: Building an effective security program all by yourself“. If I was working in a small organization, though, I’d probably go to “One Man Shop” instead.

Neither “Standing Up an Effective Penetration Testing Team” nor “In the forest of knowledge with 1o57” interests me that much, so I’d take another break here.

I’m slightly more interested in “Reverse Engineering Mac Malware” than I am in the Honeynets talk. And “RFIDler: SDR.RFID.FTW” sounds exciting: “We have created a small, open source, cheap to build platform that allows any suitably powerful microprocessor access to the raw data created by the over-the-air conversation between tag and reader coil. The device can also act as a standalone ‘hacking’ platform for RFID manipulation/examination.”

This is shaping up to be longer than I expected, so I’m going to break it into two parts. I will try to get a second part up tonight and at least cover the Friday and Saturday talks I’m interested in, if not all the way through to Sunday.

The full schedule is here, if anyone wants to look at it and make requests. I welcome comments from presenters and other people who are at DEFCON. And I will be trying to monitor twitter feeds and posting presentation links as I find them.

You will know them by the company they keep.

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

Austin mayor Lee Leffingwell (who is also a member of Criminal Mayors Conspiring to Infringe Your Rights) has declared today in Austin “Edwin Edwards Day”.

Yes, that Edwin Edwards, who for some reason came to Austin as part of his campaign for a Louisiana congressional seat. You may also remember him as the former governor of Louisiana who spent eight years in federal prison after being convicted of taking bribes.

What next? I would suggest Albert DeSalvo Day, but the Texas Legislature has been there and done that. Maybe Mayor Leffingwell would go for Lynette Fromme Day.