Blackhat USA 2010 or Bust

It is that time of year again when many information security professionals make their journey to Las Vegas for the annual BlackHat security conference. Some of eEye R&D will be attending this year and we wanted to offer you our picks for the talks we are most excited to see.

There's a party at Ring0 (and you're invited)

Speakers: Julien Tinnes, Taviso Ormandy There are many reasons you should go see this talk but the first two that come to mind are least privilege/sandboxing and Tavis Ormandy. Kernel privilege escalation vulnerabilities have long been underrated especially by IT security teams trying to prioritize what to patch first. Today however kernel privilege escalation vulnerabilities are becoming far more important as software vendors continue to try to insulate their client application products from exploitation by using various low privilege and sandboxing techniques. The ability to combine exploits and gain further privileges is an important part of the threat landscape now and over the next several years and surely Julien and Tavis are leading the pack in this area. Tavis in general has been carrying the flag for security research in a way our industry has not seen in many years and for that alone you should go to this talk and show some support.

Return-Oriented Exploitation

Speaker: Dino Dai Zovi Dino is another great security researcher who rarely disappoints and his talk is sure to be a good one. There has been an increase in the defensive measures of technology makers raising the bar on what it takes to successfully exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities. Dino’s talk will delve deep into both the current state of the art in these defensive measures and no doubt more importantly the offensive techniques to overcome them. Bring a notepad or a notebook if you dare…

Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines Redux

Speaker: Barnaby Jack I first met former eEye Researcher Barnaby Jack almost 10 years ago when I was discovering some of the first remote Windows SYSTEM vulnerabilities in the late 90’s. In searching for like-minded individuals and someone with deep “win32 ASM” knowledge I ended up meeting Barns in a win32 software cracking channel and the rest is history and a lot of good times. I was privileged to watch Barns grow within eEye Research from his early days of literally writing the book on Win32 exploitation to discovering some of the most critical Windows based software flaws to the point he eventually became bored with such research and moved into the land of hardware hacking. He quickly made short work of hacking various consumer grade routing devices not by simply leveraging configuration issues, as others had done, but by remotely exploiting buffer overflow vulnerabilities on these devices as he would as simply against Windows. This all set the stage for his greatest hack to date: ATM Machines. One of the most anticipated talks of Blackhat 2009 was Barn’s ATM hacking talk which was eventually canceled due to “issues” not under Barns control. This set back was a blessing in disguise as Barns honed his technique, of remotely hacking ATM machines, for another entire year. When Barns takes stage at this year’s Blackhat he will not only be showing that hacking in real life is cooler than the movies, but that the infrastructure of modern societies is at the mercy of anyone with time, a laptop and a lot of ingenuity. This is the talk to watch at Blackhat 2010 and possibly the Blackhat talk of the decade. As with any eEye trip to Blackhat we look forward to catching up with old friends and making new ones whether at the conference or the craps table. I look forward to your replies on what talks you are most interested in and why. We look forward to seeing you out in Vegas! Signed, Marc Maiffret CTO/Co-Founder eEye Digital Security