Highlights from DEFCON 21 Sessions

Table of Contents

About

Sessions

Pentester's Toolkit, Anch   thursday

Packing for on-site work with clients.

  • bag (krumpler camera bag)
  • work laptop (productivity tools)
  • pen test laptop
  • gb connections

Meet Pentoo, ZeroChaos   thursday

  • 32 bit
  • hosted binaries
  • standard tools and libraries
  • 6gb base image
  • shouldn't be run as live cd

Intro to Web Application Hacking, Tuna   thursday

Covered a number of exploits against php in particular with upload vectors based on botnets.

Interesting summary of the UI for php shells (filesystem browsing, mysql browsing)

Backdoors, Government Hacking and The Next Crypto, Christopher Soyhoian   friday

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323997004578641993388259674-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwMTEwNDEyWj.html

  • crypto wars
  • ssl in browsers circa 1996
  • pgp in 1997
  • growth in enterprise pgp + cloud systems
  • 2010 Google SSL on all network
  • via Cerf(?): can't encrypt user data for Google without sacrificing business model for realtime ads

Meet the VCs   friday

No significant outcomes: general rules on monitoring growth and audience validation.

  • limited focus on security in vc community
  • taking vc money is function of growth rate and advisor
  • ? vcs look for domain expertise, complete understanding (though not necessarily solutions) of the domain problems, commitment to 3y for the company build

How to use CSP to Stop XSS, Kenneth Lee   friday

Policies

  • script-src: none (no JavaScript from any source)
  • unsafe-inline
  • unsafe-eval
  • mixed-content

Report-only mode

See the reporting end-point that consumes JSON for the URI, the rule, and the detected error.

Dealing with inline JavaScript

Unsafe inline overrides but requires that all scripts be moved externally and made blocking. Async loading libraries like RequireJS still makes use of appendChild.

FF 23 has report-only header support

See: x-webkit-csp

Released tool: CSP Proxy

  • Proxy
  • Selenium harness

ACLU: NSA Surveillance and More   friday

  • Snowden impact on current policy
  • increased allocation of internal resources on "cyber"
  • ACLU supports warrant-based access to targeted
  • no dragnet-style approach should be allowed

Predicting Susceptibility to Social Bots on Twitter, Chris Sumner   saturday

  • limited impact statement
  • ml based on signals: friends, # of hashtags, @ replies

Defeating Internet Censorship with Dust, the Ploymorphic Protocol Engine   saturday

deep packet inspection hardware: force encoding of all protocols into the allowed protocol for the DPI.

Contrast english dictionary words vs. english HTTP traffic. HTTPS, even with body encrypted, has the same structure as english dictionary because of the unencrypted header.

reverse huffman encoded (e.g., only encoding to FA will drop

look for a sequence of bytes at offset: e.g., classifying HTTP traffic. this is 90% of classifier rules.

"Parrot Paper" - packet-based inspection is dead & full session better == really just "more data better" and statistical model can still work to get a message through since full message

We are Legion: Pentesting with an Army of Low-power Low-cost Devices, Philip Polstra   saturday

  • beagle bone
  • umbuntu
  • 6gb image
  • 1.1w draw at 100% cpu
  • tty mode (+)
  • mesh network up to 1m xb network
  • airmon, hydra, metasploit, fern
  • arduino
  • stamp
  • adafruit
  • spark phone
  • eagle
  • ldm designer
  • express pcb (+prototype + laying out boards)
  • ap circuits

Occam's Katana: Defeating Big Data Analytics, Rob Bird   skytalk saturday

  • book review: distance algorithms
  • closest is most reviewed but farthest is not
  • classification is just a form of distance calculation
(def points [[0 0] [2 2]])
  • possible to poison big data approach if able to have 50% of data be noise (?)
  • seemed focus on IDS and threat classification not "big data" in general

DNS May Be Hazardous to Your Health, Robert Stucke   saturday

  • look for bit-flip domain names (solar flares, server heat) then acquire domain
  • acquired domain hosting from blacklisted domains then viewed noticed that payloads were still being sent from botnets that had been shut down (i.e., taken-down domains were available for registration)
  • note changes in MS DNS default routing rules then acquire www.[internal].com

Worth a second review of the contents.

Social Engineering, Apollo Robbins   sunday

  • Same as TED talk presentation
  • Book ("confidence games"?)
  • Proximity is core goal
  • Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow

Tasks

Report-only endpoint for CSP from @kenlee

There is a Splunk report that could be generated based on mixed content on a site.

Make sure BK doesn't trigger content security policy warning for mixed content

Author: Jason Walsh

j@wal.sh

Last Updated: 2025-07-30 13:45:27

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