During this talk we're going to discuss the security of the so called internet-of-things (IOT),and have a better understanding of what it's all about. This talk will give a broad overview of IOT , the major vulnerabilities that are out there, challenges that exist in securing the things , and what we as security people can do about it.
If you'd ever heard the IOT buzzword, and you want to know what it's all about, this talk is for you.
The popularity of the Node.js coding language is soaring. Just five years after its debut, the language’s framework now boasts more 2 million downloads a month. It’s easy to understand why. This event-driven language kept the simplicity of existing Web concepts and trashed the complexities; applications built on Node.js do not require a dedicated Web server to run; and Google is even pushing the language with its enhanced V8 engine for the Google Chrome Web browser. In fact, just consider Node.js as the drive-and-go language. But before accelerating too quickly, it is important to understand the power – and corresponding mishaps – of this language.
We’ll delve under-the-hood of the language’s engine and present our 6-month research into the Node.js language. In particular, we reveal new attack techniques against applications built on top of this language. This part of the talk includes demonstrations to engage the audience.
Attacks include:
This talk is not intended to put the brakes on Node.js. On the contrary, this talk’s aim is to raise awareness to its security issues during application development.
How can we really automate secure coding? Agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration, Orchestration, Static, Dynamic - There's an endless feed of Buzzwords, but how can we turn this into a practice that really works? In this session we will review real world examples of building a successful automation process for delivery of secure software in fast paced development environments.
Side channel analysis is a remarkably powerful cryptanalytic technique. It allows attackers to extract secret information hidden inside a secure device, by analyzing the physical signals (e.g., power, heat) that the device emits as it performs a secure computation. While the potency of side-channel attacks is established without question, their application to practical settings is debatable. The main limiting factor to the practicality of side-channel attacks is the problematic attack model they assume; with the exception of network-based timing attacks, most side-channel attacks require the attacker be in “close proximity” to the victim.
In this work, we challenge this limiting assumption by presenting a successful side-channel attack that assumes a far more relaxed and practical attacker model. In our model, the victim merely has to *access a website* owned by the attacker using his personal computer. Despite this minimal model, we show how the attacker can still launch a side-channel attack in a practical time frame and extract meaningful information from the system under attack. Defending against this attack is possible, but the required countermeasures can exact an impractical cost on benign uses of the browser.
Joint work with Vasileios P. Kemerlis, Angelos D. Keromytis and Simha Sethumadhavan.
File synchronization services, such as GoogleDrive, DropBox and others are becoming widespread, both with private and corporate use. These applications, while offering great convenience to their users, also provide a hacker with ideal platform for C2 infrastructure. Instead of setting up a new C2 server, an attacker simply needs to open a new cloud storage account, or even use the victims account as the platform.
In our presentation we will examine how common cloud synchronization services can be used by hackers to steal private and corporate data, remain persistent on infected machines and avoid perimeter detection mechanisms. All of this could be done from the attacker’s laptop, without any exploits and without writing server side code.
Objective: Understand risks & mitigations of MitC attacks
The first is in the Android Platform and Google Play Services. The Platform instance affects Android 4.3-5.1, M (Preview 1) or 55% of Android devices at the time of writing. This vulnerability allows for arbitrary code execution in the context of many apps and services and results in elevation of privileges. In this talk we also demonstrate a Proof-of-Concept exploit against the Google Nexus 5 device, that achieves code execution inside the highly privileged system_server process, and then either replaces an existing arbitrary application on the device with our own malware app or changes the device’s SELinux policy. For some other devices, we are also able to gain kernel code execution by loading an arbitrary kernel module. We had responsibly disclosed the vulnerability to Android Security Team which tagged it as CVE-2015-3825 (internally as ANDROID-21437603/21583894) and patched Android 4.4 / 5.x / M and Google Play Services.
For the sake of completeness we also made a large scale experiment over 32,701 of Android applications, finding similar deserialization vulnerabilities, identified by CVE-2015-2000/1/2/3/4/20, in 6 SDKs affecting multiple apps. We responsibly (privately) contacted the SDKs’ vendors or code maintainers so they would provide patches. Further analysis showed that many of the SDKs were vulnerable due to weak code generated by SWIG, an interoperability tool that connects C/C++ with variety of languages, when fed with some bad configuration given by the developer. We therefore worked closely with the SWIG team to make sure it would generate more robust code — patches are available.
We created “Game of Hacks”– a viral web app marketed as a tool to train developers on secure coding – with the intention of building a honeypot. Game of Hacks, built using the node.js framework, displays a range of vulnerable code snippets challenging the player to locate the vulnerability. A multiplayer option makes the challenge even more attractive and the leaderboard spices up things when players compete for a seat on the iron throne.
Within 24 hours we had 35K players test their hacking skills...we weren't surprised when users started breaking the rules.
Join us to: • Play GoH against the audience in real time and get your claim for fame. • Understand how vulnerabilities were planted within Game of Hacks. • See real attack techniques (some caught us off guard) and how we handled them. • Learn how to avoid vulnerabilities in your code and how to go about designing a secure application. • Hear what to watch out for on the ultra-popular node.js framework.
