Offensive Approaches to Information Assurance

Speaker: Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, BBN Technologies

Abstract:
Apophenia, anchoring, confirmation traps and other psychological phenomena influence not only defenders but also the attackers. The first third of the talk focuses on some examples of these and other traits and how they can be used both for and against an adversary. The second part of the talk dives into examples and ideas revolving around novel data acquisition and system compromise through non-standard means. The talk finishes with the novel approaches to asymmetric defensive tactics in information security environments.

Time: 28 January 2008 (Monday) at 1630 hrs
Location: Gates 4B (opposite 490)

Daoli: Grid security via Trusted Computing protected virtualization

Speaker: Wenbo Mai, EMC Research

Abstract:
A grid builds a virtual organization (VO) of unbounded computational and storage capacity by pooling heterogeneous resources from real organizations. A grid user is typically a resource scarce entity while having a large quantity of jobs to be processed. With the user in need of resources from resourceful organizations, we shall name a user a resource lessee and the latter entities resource lessors. Currently grids in such a lessee-lessor-VO structure are not in commercial adoption yet. Ideally, commercial enterprises, like resource-abundant-and-under-utilized financial institutions, should go for the grid, i.e., become lessors. Inadequate grid security currently prevents commercial organizations from being lessors. A missing security service is behavior conformity: VO code must not damage the lessor, and conversely, the lessor must not compromise the VO proprietary information.

Project Daoli attempts to strengthen grid security by adding behavior conformity to grid computing. We will apply Trusted Computing Group's (TCG) technology as our means to behavior conformity and we do so by working on virtualization in two layers in the software stack. In the OS layer, a highly-privileged hypervisor for memory arbitration will be measured by a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to achieve isolation between processes. Above OSes a grid middleware will achieve virtualization of hardware platforms and commodity OSes so that a unique VO code for policy enforcement can run on the middleware across a heterogeneous environment. The VO code and/or data which need confidentiality and/or integrity protection are secured by cryptographic credentials. By calling the standard credential migration function of TCG, VO credentials can be migrated from one TPM to another along the leased platforms.

Time: 11 December 2007 (Tuesday) at 1630 hrs
Location: Gates 4B (opposite 490)

Tradeoffs in Retrofitting Security: An Experience Report

Speaker: Mark S. Miller, Google

Abstract:
In 1973, John Reynold's and James Morris' Gedanken Language retrofit object-capability security into an Algol-like base language. Today, there are active projects retrofitting Java, Javascript, Python, Mozart/Oz, OCaml, Perl, and Pict. These represent a variety of approaches, with different tradeoffs regarding legacy compatibility, safety, and expressivity. In this talk I propose a taxonomy of these approaches, and discuss some of the lessons learned to date.

Time: 4 December 2007 (Tuesday) at 1630 hrs
Location: Gates 4B (opposite 490)

Distributed Knowledge Authorization Language

Speaker: Yuri Gurevich, Microsoft Research

Abstract:
DKAL is a new expressive declarative authorization language for distributed systems. It is designed with user-centric access control in mind, and it features targeted communication and nested quotations. Knowledge plays a key role in DKAL. In principle, every principal computes "his" own knowledge. A resource manager permits the use of the resource if he concludes, on the basis of information available to him, that the permission should be granted. DKAL rests on the firm foundation of existential fixed-point logic. It has not been implemented yet.

Time: 27 November 2007 (Tuesday) at 1630 hrs
Location: Gates 4B (opposite 490)

Attacks On the Netscape Browser plus Security Response Philosophy and Methods

Speaker: Jim Roskind, Roskind Consulting

Abstract:
The Netscape Communicator client was deployed on millions of desktops. It was also subject to attacks that attempted to gain unauthorized access to data on the client's computers, if not complete control of the computer. This talk discusses a broad range of examples of attacks that have been proposed against the Communicator application along with ways that the application evolved to block them.

Although the talk discusses numerous actual attacks across the history of Netscape, it also works to abstract elements of attacks, and show how they assemble to form exploits. The start of the talk, first presented in RSA2001, discusses 6 noteworthy historical attacks. The attacks include DNS False Advertising (not, DNS compromise!), Java class verifier vulnerability to a multi-thread attack, JavaScript Language feature creating a cache handling vulnerability, Java symbol table overrun, FILE: URL facilitating invasion of privacy, and insufficient HTML escaping browser side (not server side!).

As a bonus (not presented in RSA2001), a more generic discussion of issues surrounding security responses to identified security bugs is presented. The resolution to some of the above problems reveals that security patching is significantly different from software bug repair, and that fact needs to be used by response teams. The discussion ranges from problems caused by a lengthily QA cycle (and avoiding thrashing when bug inter-arrival/discovery time is smaller than a QA cycle), to why a bugs bounty is helpful (but why a bounty that is too large is actually problematic). Also presented is a proposed method to prevent reverse engineering of security patches (by distributing encrypted(??) patches). The method can also automate identification of *which* if any existing patch is critical during an attack, and it can accelerate and even automate patch deployment of the critical patch(es).

Time: 13 November 2007 (Tuesday) at 1630 hrs
Location: Gates 4B (opposite 490)

Some Results From the California Top To Bottom Review

Speaker: Eric Rescorla

Abstract:
In Spring of 2007, the California Secretary of State convened a team of security researchers to review the electronic voting systems certified for use in California. We were provided with the source code for the systems as well as with access to the hardware. Serious and exploitable vulnerabilities were found in all the systems analyzed: Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia. We'll be discussing the effort as a whole, providing an overview of the issues that all the teams found, and then discussing in detail the system we studied, Hart InterCivic.

Joint work with Srinivas Inguva, Hovav Shacham, and Dan Wallach

Time: 6 November 2007 (Tuesday) at 1630 hrs
Location: Gates 4B (opposite 490)

The Drives Project: From Disk Forensics to Media Exploitation

Speaker: Simson Garfinkel

Abstract:
A hard drive is a window into the past and a door into the mind. Using forensic techniques the data on a hard drive can reveal who broke into a computer system, what was done, and the perpetrators. Hard drives have proved so useful that they are now routinely seized or imaged in DoD, intelligence, law enforcement, and even civil actions.

But analyzing the information a hard drive today takes the time of a skilled analyst; today's tools lack significant automation and intelligence, and frequently crash. As a result there is a large backlog of hard drives waiting to be analyzed; important information is easily missed or not analyzed for months after it is acquired.

This talk discusses the work to date of the Drives Project, a 9-year (and counting) effort that is creating a large-scale collection of real disk drive images, open source tools, and new techniques for automatically processing data recovered from disk drives and other kinds of storage devices. Today the Drives Project has assembled a corpus of more than 1000 forensically interesting images from hard drives and USB storage devices that were collected all over the world. We have created open source formats, tools and algorithms for automatically analyzing this data in bulk and rapidly producing answers to questions that are relevant to the Defense, Intelligence and Law Enforcement communities. The Project is now in the process of dramatically expanding the global reach of data being acquired and exploring new research opportunities for using this data.

Time: 2 November 2007 (Friday) at 1630 hrs
Location: Gates 4B (opposite 490)