[ We're In @ Black Hat Vegas ]

Holy crap! I can't believe we actually got in!


The first computer security conference I ever attended was Black Hat Vegas last year and now I'm going to be speaking there with Nate McFeters, Billy Rios and John Heasman. Crazy. I've spoken now at Black Hat Japan, Federal and Europe, but Vegas is The Big Show. Thanks to everybody who voted for us.

Our talk is entitled "The Internet Is Broken: Beyond document.cookie - Extreme Client Side Exploitation". We're going to show some pretty sick stuff there and it's going to be a two-session deal. Prepare yourself for a brain-meltingly awesome talk.



See you in Vegas!

[ Blue Hat Day 2 ]

I think I'm sufficiently recovered to blog about day 2.


I'm just kidding, it wasn't that bad, but I did drink a ton of vodka that night at the IOActive-sponsored limo races, and the Jello shots at the end didn't help at all either.

But let's rewind a bit and reminisce about the talks. Billy and Nitesh started off the conference in style with their Bad Sushi talk. Even though I've seen this talk 3 times I still enjoy it immensely.

Then kuza55 (Alex K.) talked about The Browser and Other Mistakes. It's been said before by others that his grasp of web app security is amazing for his age and I agree, but he's also a pretty cool guy to hang out with as well. He had some great stuff in his talk and some of the things he mentioned gave me ideas for future research.

Another talk I really enjoyed was Manuel Caballeros' talk about resident scripts. That talk was sick. I couldn't believe some of the stuff I was seeing. That will definitely be a focus in some of my future research into other languages.

Also, I got to meet Peleus Uhley and Eric Lee of the Adobe product security team. We worked pretty closely with them to get our Flash DNS Rebinding issue fixed.

When all was said and done I really had a great time there and I can't believe I was actually invited to attend. Thanks again to Katie Moussouris for inviting Nate and I out to the Microsoft campus. And kudos to the MSRC for all their efforts in the security space. It really looks like things are heading in the right direction. Unfortunately that makes my job more difficult...

I'll leave you with a picture from the inside of team Stoners/Hippies limo before our booze was stolen by certain unnamed assailants:


By the way, Nate has a pretty good writeup about Blue Hat over on the ZDNet Zero Day blog. Check it out.

[ Blue Hat Day 1 ]

I'm not going to say much in this post because I'm really tired right now. Mostly because I traveled today and it's 3:30 am in my time zone. But I'm back in Seattle again (last time was about two weeks ago) and this time it's for Microsoft's Blue Hat conference.


Microsoft held a welcoming party for everybody at the See Sound Lounge in downtown fairly close to the waterfront. Pretty cool place, live DJ, good finger foods and free alcohol. I got to hang out with Nate, Billy, John, Kev, Nitesh, h1kar1, kuza55, fukami, Peleus Uhley and Dan "Sombrero" Kaminsky. I think I see some of these guys more than I see my girlfriend these days.

But anyway, seems like they have a great line up of speakers and topics here and I'm really honored that I was invited to attend. Let the talks begin!

[ toorcon Seattle was Awesome ]

I had a great time at toorcon Seattle. The talks were awesome.


Dan Kaminsky dropped a bomb about how ISPs were taking non-existent subdomains and redirecting them to ad-servers. And let's say these web sites serving up these ads contain an XSS...yeah, MASS pwnage. Gotta love how docucment.domain works. Dan actually rickrolled us all.

And then John Heasman's talk about the Java browser plugin and Java Web Start was equally enlightening. Sun has some major problems in their implementations of certain aspects of Java. Anyway, I hope Kev is included more in the next version of his talk...

Katie Moussouris gave a pretty interesting talk on her role at Microsoft and what they're trying to do for responsible disclosure...WHAT? I said Microsoft really is advocating responsible disclosure these days...WHAT?! I said Microsoft seems to really be turning things around...OK!!!!


The talk Nate and I did on URI Use and Abuse seemed to get a good response as well. Anyway, there were other great talks that I'm too tired to include right now, but I just want to commend the toorcon team. They really outdid themselves with the parties they threw at the Public N3rd Area and the Last Supper Club. Hats off to all of them. Toorcon San Diego last year was the first one I had ever been to but I'm going to try to make it a point to come back to as many toorcons as possible.


Especially the one in the cooling tower of the half-built nuclear plant!

[ toorcon Seattle ]

Well, I'm in the beautiful city of Seattle and have just enjoyed the first night of the conference put on by h1kar1 and team. I loved the live DJ's and the Public N3rd Area.

But before I got there, I saw this on one of the screens at the airport in my home town:


At least they've upgraded from 98 to XP... Sorry for the blurry picture quality, I was in a hurry.

But it's time for me to get some sleep. Nate and I have to rework our talk to fit into a 20 minute slot. Can't wait to hear Dan Kaminsky and John Heasman's talks.