CONFidence Wrap-Up

This morning I delivered a talk at CONFidence 2007 in Krakow, Poland. I'd like to thank Andrzej Targosz and Jacek Artymiak for being the best hosts I've met at any conference. They got me at the airport, took me to dinner (along with dozens of others), and will take me to the airport (at 0430 no less!) tomorrow. I spent a good amount of time with Anton Chuvakin, Daniel Cid, and Stefano Zanero, which was very cool.

I'd like to mention two talks. First, I watched Paweł Pokrywka talk about a neat way to discovery layer two LAN topology with crafted ARP packets. Unfortunately, his talk was in Polish and I didn't exactly learn how he does it! I spoke to Paweł briefly before my own talk, and he said he plans to release a paper (in English) and his code (called Etherbat), so I look forward to seeing both.

Second, I attended Dinis Cruz's talk on buffer overflows in .NET and ASP.NET. I'm afraid I can't say anything intelligent about his talk. Dinis is a coding ninja and I really only left his talk with one idea: all general-computing platforms can be broken. What's funny is I'm not even sure Dinis would agree with me. His point seemed to be that .NET and ASP.NET (as well as other managed code environments) are breakable, but if implemented "properly," could be made not breakable.

Let's think about that for a moment. I'm sure the people who dreamed up .NET and ASP.NET are really smart. However, there are problems that render them vulnerable to people like Dinis. "Fine," you say. "Let Dinis help Microsoft fix the problems." Ok, Dinis helps implement a new version of this framework. A year or so later someone with a different insight or skill comes along and breaks the new version. And so on. This is the history of general purpose computing. I don't see a way to break the cycle if we continue to want developers to be able to write general purpose software. I am not speaking as a developer, but as an historian. We have been walking this path for over 20 years and I don't see any improvements.

Update: I forgot to mention that I liked Anton Chuvakin's definition of forensics:

Computer forensics is the application of the scientific method to digital media to establish factual information for judicial review.

Comments

Anonymous said…
It's been a pleasure having you as one of our speakers, Richard.

Have a safe trip home!

Here are some pictures from the event.

Jacek
10:04 AM
Richard Bejtlich said…
Etherbat has been released.
8:44 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more