Announcing BlueHat v9: Through the Looking Glass

Handle:
C-Lizzle

IRL:
Celene Temkin

Rank:
Program Manager 2 & BlueHat Project Manager

Likes:
Culinary warfare, BlueHat hackers and responsible disclosure

Dislikes:
Acts of hubris, MySpace, orange mocha Frappaccinos!

 BlueHat v9 will take place from October 21 to 23 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Last year, we experimented with a day dedicated to attacks and a day dedicated to SDL security mitigations. This year, we will give you the best content out there… we are interweaving talks from internal and external security subject matter experts with themes related to e-crime, mobile security, cloud computing, and fuzzing.

We kick it off with the BlueHat Executive Sessions on October 21 with condensed versions of the presentations delivered in a deeply technical "Cliff Notes" style. October 22 and 23 are filled with BlueHat General Sessions for our Microsoft IT pro and developer population.

As a refresher, this conference is primarily about educating our own Microsoft population so we can better understand how to build more secure products. The more we know about the security ecosystem, the more we at Microsoft can truly comprehend and assess our own security reality.

We were able to record talks and deliver them to the masses on the Web for BlueHat v8 -- we'll continue this momentum and keep the "technical equivalent of those free online courses from MIT" coming for all attendees. You can also count on the usual speaker video podcasts, anecdotes, archives, and new to BlueHat v9, the first BlueHat Training Video examining Office Binary File Formats, content provided by our benevolent counterparts on the MSRC Engineering Team.

As always, I’m incredibly excited to see the amazing security education, partnerships, and networking opportunities that come out of our community-based defense platform. Like Alice going through the looking glass to get to Wonderland, we have to change our perspective to understand the threat landscape. Should Alice want to send a message back to Bob in the real world, it’s up to all of us to keep Eve out of the conversation. ;-)

Here’s a brief overview of the talks and speakers. Full details will be available on the BlueHat web site within the week.

October 22, 2009

Morning Block: Hyper Reality: Who’s Been Painting My Roses Red?

Tumble down the rabbit hole with us as we kick off the BlueHat v9 General Sessions examining e-crime motivation, attacks, and how to navigate through the mounting social engineering aspect of security coverage. We kick off with Jose Nazario taking a deep dive into DDoS attacks and their growing role as an online political weapon in Politically Motivated Denial of Service Attacks. Next up, Adobe’s Peleus Uhley and our own Jesse Collins will scrutinize the great power and responsibility that comes along with those flashy Web applications in RIA Security: Real-World Lessons from Flash and Silverlight. We then wrap up the morning *Cheshire Cat grin* exploring a little flaw by the name of ATL in The Language of Trust: Exploiting Trust Relationships in Active Content, by Ryan Smith, Mark Dowd and David Dewey.

Afternoon Block: Mobile (in)Security: Curiouser and Curiouser

As more people onboard themselves to smart mobile devices our wonderland certainly has gottencuriouser and curiouser. Take a ride with us as Luis Miras and Zane Lackey uncover Attacking SMS and show us how easy it is to be a victim when there is hardly any user interaction needed to fall prey to attack. Next up, our own Josh Lackey will serve some of the teacups of goodness and tell us what is on the horizon with Mobile Security and Software Radio. Charlie Miller will then show us how to stand on our heads and use automated fuzzing on the iPhone and outline the vuln he found as well as how to exploit it in iPhone SMS Hacking with a Touch About Payloads. Last, we will hear from Patrick McCanna of AT&T Security as he gives us an overview of security threats that face mobile operators in Mobile Operator Security: Security Challenges for Global Networks for Pocket-sized Devices.

October 23, 2009

Morning Block: Cloud Services & Virtualization: Up Above the World You Fly, Like a Tea Tray in the Sky…

Kicking off day 2, we find ourselves up in the clouds, quite literally. In Cloudifornication: Indiscriminate Information Intercourse Involving Internet Infrastructure, Chris Hoff of Cisco takes us on a journey where we learn some really scary things happening with the massive convergence of virtualization and cloud computing and their effect on security models and the information they are designed to protect. Our own Mad Hatter, John Walton, will walk us through advantages and challenges within the Microsoft Software-plus-Services model in Get Your Head Out of the Clouds: Security in Software-plus-Services. Flying up even further, Robert Fly takes on a journeyhighlighting unique aspects of building enterprise-ready cloud services and how to avoid the torrential rainfall of unforeseen problems in Creating Clouds: Avoiding Rain In The Transition From On-Premise To Services. We then wind up the afternoon with past BlueHat speakers Billy Rios and Nitesh Dhanjani engaging us in new discussions on the security implications and magic mushrooms that are likely to effect the cloud platforms and their clients in the near future in Sharing the Cloud with Your Enemy .

Afternoon Block: Fuzzing Tools & Mitigations: Chasing the White Rabbit

As we end our adventure through the looking glass, our Google friends Tavis Ormandy and Neel Mehta will paint a picture on how their technique of sub-instruction profiling uncovered multiple vulnerabilities in Windows. Next up, we get to take a peek Under the Kimono of Office Security Engineering with our own Tom Gallagher and Dave Conger as they show us a framework built by the Office team to efficiently fuzz any file format parser. The final session before hearing from our guests in the security community amongst the ill-fated gong of our lighting talks will be Chris Webers’ Character Transformations: Finding Hidden Vulnerabilities. This talk will cover ways which latent character and string handling can transform clever inputs into malicious outputs in cross-site scripting.

We will continue to update the BlueHat blog and the TechNet site to keep you current on the happenings during and around the conference. See you in Wonderland!

-Celene

*Postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*