Marshall Beddoe and Chris Abad The Siphon Project
0HalVar Flake - Reverse Engineer, Black Hat.
Hit them where it hurts: Finding holes in COTS software
Application security is crucial in any modern networked environment. While many security architectures can survive a single critical service "developing" a major security vulnerability few will survive the seperate "development" of several vulnerabilities
for several critical systems at once.
While everybody knows that commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software is usually full of bugs, few researchers outside of government organizations actually analyze the disassembly of COTS software for common programming mistakes such as buffer overruns and format string vulnerabilities. This speech will introduce you to the topic of analyzing COTS software for (in)security.
An overview over various problematic C/C++ coding mistakes will be given with specific detail on how these mistakes translate to the underlying assembly language (specifically IA32/x86 assembly). After the audience is familiar with spotting these mistakes, the focus of the speech will shift towards automating the boring and repetitive task when auditing COTS software -- programs which automatically find suspicious constructs in the binaries will be explained & demonstrated.
The last focus of the presentation will be a demonstration of how the techniques discussed would be applied to a major networking infrastructure product such as a commercial and widely used firewall.
HalVar Flake is BlackHat's new resident reverse engineer. Originating in the fields of copy protection and digital rights management, he gravitated more and more towards network securityover time as he realized that constructive copy protection is more or less fighting windmills. After writing his first few exploits he was hooked and realized that reverse engineering experience is a very handy asset when dealing with COTS software. With extensive experience in reverse engineering, network security, penetration testing and exploit development he recently joined BlackHat as their main reverse engineer.
Black Hat - USA - 2001 Hacking conference
#hacking, #hackers, #infosec, #opsec, #IT, #security