Black Hat events cover the entire spectrum of information security topics, but it's hard to deny that our programming on good, old-fashioned vulnerabilities is among the most immediately exciting. It is, after all, fun to break things (and if they're important things, all the better). Today's four highlighted Black Hat Briefings focus on exploits, exploits, and more exploits. Enjoy.
Wireless systems and their radio signals are everywhere: consumer, corporate, government, amateur -- widely deployed and often vulnerable. If you have ever wondered what sort of information is buzzing around you, Hacking the Wireless World with Software Defined Radio - 2.0 will introduce how you can dominate the RF spectrum by "blindly" analyzing any signal, and then begin reverse engineering it from the physical layer up using open-source software and cheap hardware. The applications are nearly endless. If you have any SDR equipment, bring it along!
Because patching all vulnerabilities for a modern, complex software system is difficult due to bug volume and response-time requirements, software vendors usually devise quick workarounds to mitigate the exploitation of a given vulnerability. But those patches are sometimes incomplete, so attackers can utilize different attack vectors to re-exploit the patched vulnerability. Exploiting Unpatched iOS Vulnerabilities for Fun and Profit will do just this in iOS 7.1.1, exploiting previously patched vulnerabilities to run unsigned code with root permissions and defeat mandatory code signing.
"Human hacking," the social engineering of employees, contractors, and other trusted persons, is an ever-present threat to enterprises, with financial institutions in particular seeing a significant increase in account takeover attacks by sophisticated fraudsters socially engineering call-center agents. Lifecycle of a Phone Fraudster: Exposing Fraud Activity from Reconnaissance to Takeover Using Graph Analysis and Acoustical Anomalies will show how acoustical anomalies can be utilized to detect over 80% of such calls, with only a 2% error rate. Come see how these advanced detection techniques can be used to track the lifecycle of these fraudsters as they worm their way through the call-center's human infrastructure.
Many mobile devices use touch-based sequences to enhance security, and these tend to be hard to observe and decipher by most bystanders. But in My Google Glass Sees Your Passwords! Xinwen Fu and Zhen Ling will demonstrate a new, Google Glass-based attack that uses sophisticated computer vision techniques to recognize more than 90% of tapped mobile passcodes from three meters away. They'll also demonstrate one possible countermeasure, their randomized-layout Privacy Enhancing Keyboard (PEK).
Regular registration ends on July 26. Please visit Black Hat USA 2014's registration page to get started.