Black Hat Asia 2014: The Weaponized Web
From the post:
The World Wide Web has grown exponentially since its birth 21 years ago, and it now serves as the interface for many of the apps we use every day. It’s hard to imagine a more enticing target for hacks and exploits. Today’s trio of Black Hat Briefings explore ways the Web can be weaponized … and how to defend against it.
Even as HTML 5 proliferates as an enabler of rich interactive Web applications, cross-site scripting (XSS) remains one of the top three Web application vulnerabilities. DOM-based XSS is growing in popularity, but its client-side nature makes it difficult to monitor for malicious payloads. Ultimate Dom Based XSS Detection Scanner on Cloud delves into this thorny issue. Nera W. C. Liu and Albert Yu will show how they managed to introduce and propagate tainted attributes to a DOM input interface, and then devised a system to detect such breaches by harnessing the power of PhantomJS, a headless browser for automation.
JavaScript’s ubiquity makes it the subject of aggressive security-community research, boosting its effective security level every day. Sounds good, but in JS Suicide: Using JavaScript Security Features to Kill JS Security, AhamedNafeez will demonstrate that these security features can be a double-edged sword, sometimes allowing an attacker to disable certain other JS protection mechanisms. In particular, the sandboxing features of ECMAScript 5 can break security in many JS applications. Real-world examples of other JS security lapses are also on the agenda.
Ready-made exploit kits make it easier than ever for malicious parties to victimize unwary Internet users. Jose Miguel Esparza will take us down that rabbit hole in PDF Attack: A Journey From the Exploit Kit to the Shellcode, in which he’ll teach how to manually extract obfuscated URLs and binaries from these weaponized pages. You’ll also learn how to do modify a malicious PDF payload yourself to bypass AV software, a useful trick for pentesting.
Looking to register? Please visit Black Hat Asia 2014’s registration page to get started.
One of the things I like about Black Hat is their honesty. Computer enthusiasts include the usual high school/college nerds and white shirt/blue tie crowd but there are those who follow a different track. And some of those, don’t work for national governments.
If you need more evidence for the argument that software (not just the WWW) is systematically broken (Back to Basics: Beyond Network Hygiene by Felix ‘FX’ Lindner and Sandro Gaycken), review the agenda for this Black Hat conference or for proceeding years.
As long as software security remains a separate security product or patch to existing software issue, Black Hat isn’t going to go lacking for conference material.