Cryptography lets secrets remain secret, or at least that's the idea. In the security business we often discover that a given crypto method isn't quite as secure as hoped, whether due to unforeseen edge cases or direct interference by unfriendly parties. Today's quartet of Black Hat Briefings all explore this oft-hidden world, shedding light on crypto flaws both small and momentous.
Over 10,000 people participated in the Matasano crypto challenges, a staged learning exercise where participants implemented 48 different attacks against realistic cryptographic constructions. This has resulted in a crypto exploit codebase spanning dozens of languages, from X86 assembly to Haskell. In 48 Dirty Little Secrets Cryptographers Don't Want You To Know Thomas Ptacek and Alex Balducci will walk you through all 48 challenges, putting them into context and going in-depth on some of the most interesting.
At the network layer, encrypted tunnels are typically seen as black boxes -- good. But network traffic leaks side-channel information that can often be analyzed to determine the tunnel's purpose and likely content -- less good. Probabilistic Spying on Encrypted Tunnels will dive deep into the probabilistic algorithms that can analyze this side-channel information, and the presenters will conclude by releasing an open-source toolkit containing the demonstrated attacks and algorithms.
The NSA's all up in our junk, to put it technically, and recent revelations from their ANT program show that they use many well-known and low-cost physical and firmware attacks that can compromise system integrity and in-use data. And as cloud use accelerates, more and more of an organization's computing infrastructure is outside of its physical control. Protecting Data In-Use from Firmware and Physical Attacks will review several such attacks, including SMM bootkits, "cold booting," and malicious devices, as well as existing tools and technologies to mitigate them.
SSL has been around for decades and yet it keeps happening: new attacks are being discovered against TLS at a steady rate. In The BEAST Wins Again: Why TLS Keeps Failing to Protect HTTP Antoine Delignat-Lavaud will present three new attacks against TLS. The final one exploits vulnerabilities in HTTPS deployments to achieve the holy grail of TLS attacks: full server impersonation of several thousands of websites, including Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, PayPal. He'll also give some tips on defending against these unorthodox attacks and dispel a few TLS security misconceptions while he's at it.
Regular registration ends on July 26. Please visit Black Hat USA 2014's registration page to get started.