ToorCon Seattle 2008
The ToorCon organization puts on some of the best conferences in my opinion, and this last weekend was version 1.0 of their Seattle conference (beta was last year, which I also attended). Friday night was entirely 5-minute lightning talks and then Saturday was entirely 20-minute turbo talks. Sunday was workshops, which unfortunately I could not attend since I had to fly back to Austin mid-day. Last year was invite only and if you were there last year you received a coupon code for a discounted rate this year ($300), otherwise it was a little expensive to attend ($1000). Overall there were a number of excellent speakers with excellent content.
For my thoughts on the various presentations and talks that I saw, please click through to my Personal Blog.
CSI-SX 2008
CSI-SX is the new branding for the CSI NetSec conference, which is co-located with Interop Las Vegas, and is essentially the security-focused portion of the overall conference. As with the annual CSI conference, this conference targets a different demographic than I'm used to speaking for as the attendance is usually comprised of very large enterprise and government employees and I usually speak for conferences targeted at the research and hacker communities.
The night before the first day of conference sessions a speaker reception was held which I attended. I met a number of people from the conference staff whom I had not met before as well as a few of the other speakers. Surprisingly I was well-received by this crowd, even with my spiked green hair, which I'm sure they don't see a lot of at this type of conference.
For my thoughts on the various presentations and talks that I saw, please click through to my Personal Blog.
ToorCon 9 and Context-keys
Late last night I returned from ToorCon 9 in San Diego. I was able to make it out on time without any objections from the raging fires, but others I know were not quite as lucky. Even though the conference was awesome and San Diego, as always, had beautiful weather, it's nice to be back in Austin. This year I spoke at ToorCon on the subject of context-keyed payload encoders. You can view both the slides and video at my personal website if you're so inclined. For an extensive review of ToorCon 9 and all of the talks I attended, please click-through to my personal blog.
Toorcon Wrap-Up
Now that all is said and done, Toorcon 9 was a smashing success! It was well stocked on great talks and good people and, of course, the after parties were wild fun.
There was a strong theme of automated exploitation this year. Three of the talks that I saw focused on the subject. First up is Jerome Athias, who impressed everyone with his presentation's 3D graphical cinema introduction and then impressed again with his toolkit (written in an IDE called WinDev) for writing exploit modules for the Metasploit Framework in only a minute or two.
Another great talk was given by Jason Medeiros. He started off describing his methodology for detecting different types of crashes and followed up with a cool demo. He had written "from scratch" a complete debugger and heap analyzer. His program took a custom fuzzer definition and a binary as input. A few moments later, his demo generated a C exploit for the stack overflow that his fuzzer had just found.
Then there's the talk given by Nathan Rittenhouse and Johnny Cache. Their talk was focused on Byakugan, a WinDbg plugin. Byakugan is filled with goodies, but the real show stopper was the 3d-accelerated heap visualization. Nathan also gave a demo of his new Ruby replacement for pydbg, which seems to be exactly what I have been looking for. This should be posted to http://noxusfiles.com/ soon. Thanks, Nathan!
Vegas Redux: Black Hat / Defcon Materials
The materials from my Black Hat and Defcon presentations are now available online. If you were not able to attend the talks, the Tactical Exploitation whitepaper is a good place to start. The Black Hat presentation was much more detailed than the Defcon version, due to the longer time slot.
Viva Las Vegas: Tactical Exploitation
I will be presenting at Black Hat USA 2007 (August 1-2) and Defcon 15 (August 3-5) with Valsmith of Offensive Computing on the topic of Tactical Exploitation. This talk introduces a tactical approach to penetration testing that does not rely on exploiting known vulnerabilities. Using a combination of new tools and obscure techniques, we will walk through the process of compromising an organization without the use of normal exploit code. More information about this talk can be found in the DarkReading article.