Vanja Svajcer from SophosLabs Croatia joined me this week to discuss the presentations we were able to attend at this year’s Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences in Las Vegas, Nevada.
This Tuesday was the monthly patch day for Microsoft and Adobe, as usual, I briefly highlighted the most important updates for August.
Vanja and I attended some sessions together and others independently and we shared our thoughts from the most interesting of the sessions we were able to attend.
We began by discussing research into the security of Google’s recently released ChromeOS. Vanja pointed out how hacking ChromeOS is less about the operating system and much more about how you can take advantage of flaws in the Chrome browser itself.
Both of us had the pleasure of seeing Moxie Marlinspike speak at DEFCON on SSL insecurity and his proposed solutions. We both appreciated the in-depth look Marlinspike presented and found his proposed solution, Convergence, an interesting way of solving the authenticity problem.
Vanja attended a session by the team from Lookout Security about the patch life cycle on the Android OS.
The Lookout team reviewed the average time from discovery of a vulnerability until when Google provided a patch, then looked at the average amount of time each OEM took to integrate that patch into their Android distribution for each handset, and how long each carrier took to make that available to their customers.
I discussed my thoughts on the research done by Jay Radcliffe on hacking insulin pumps through their RF interface.
Radcliffe uncovered some rather disturbing findings as to the security implemented to protect users of these devices which will hopefully spur on the manufacturers to improve their implementations in future devices.
The last talk we discussed was given by Jason Scott on the work of archiveteam.org whose slogan is “We are going to rescue your sh*t”. Scott talked about what Archive Team does, why they do it and he presented his case with a lot of panache.
(11 August 2011, duration 23:42 minutes, size 16.3 MBytes)
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