Netherlands Previous Events 2011

Chapter Meeting July 6th 2011

Date & Time: July 6th, 2011 - 19:00

Location: VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam

Speakers:

Nick Nikiforakis

Nick Nikiforakis is a PhD student at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium.

He belongs in the DistriNet research group and specifically in the “Security & Languages” task-force.

His current research interests include low-level security for unsafe languages and web application security

Nick holds a BSc in Computer Science and a MSc on Distributed Systems from the University of Crete in Greece.

He worked for 3 years as a research assistant in the Distributed Computing Systems group at the Foundation of Research and Technology in Crete where he did research in network data visualization, authentication schemes using mobile devices and phishing countermeasures.

In the past, Nick has presented his work in academic conferences as well as hacking conventions.

His work can be found online at www.securitee.org

Abstract: The increasing popularity of the World Wide Web has made more and more individuals and companies to identify the need of acquiring a Web presence. The most common way of acquiring such a presence is through Web hosting companies and the most popular hosting solution is shared Web hosting.

In this talk we investigate the workings of shared Web hosting and we point out the potential lack of session isolation between domains hosted on the same physical server. We present two novel server-side attacks against session storage which target the logic of a Web application instead of specific logged-in users. Due to the lack of isolation, an attacker with a domain under his control can force arbitrary sessions to co-located Web applications as well as inspect and edit the contents of their existing active sessions. Using these techniques, an attacker can circumvent authentication mechanisms, elevate his privileges, steal private information and conduct attacks that would be otherwise impossible. Finally, we test the applicability of our attacks against common open-source software and evaluate their effectiveness in the presence of generic server-side countermeasures.

Marco Balduzzi

Marco Balduzzi holds an MSc. in computer engineering and has been involved in IT-Security for more then 8 years with international experiences in both industrial and academic fields.

He worked as security consultant and engineer for different companies in Milan, Munich and Sophia-Antipolis, in south France, before joining EURECOM and the International Secure Systems Lab as Ph.D. researcher.

He attended well-known and high-profile conferences all over (Blackhat, OWASP AppSec, NDSS) and currently speak five different languages.

Being a Free Software sympathizer, in the year 2K, he cofounded the Bergamo Linux User Group and the University Laboratory of Applied Computing.

In former times, he was an active member of several open-source projects and Italian hacking groups

Abstract: The (in)security of File Hosting Services

File hosting services (FHSs) are used daily by thousands of people as a way of storing and sharing files. These services normally rely on a security-through-obscurity approach to enforce access control: for each uploaded file, the user is given a secret URI that she can share with other users of her choice. This talk presents a study of 100 file hosting services and shows that a significant percentage of them generate secret URIs in a predictable fashion, allowing attackers to enumerate their services and access their file list. An attacker can access hundreds of thousands of files in a short period of time, and this poses a very big risk for the privacy of FHS users. Indeed, using a novel approach, we show that attackers are aware of these vulnerabilities and are already exploiting them to get access to other users' files. The talk concludes by presenting SecureFS, a client-side protection mechanism which can protect a user's files when uploaded to insecure FHSs, even if the files end up in the possession of attackers.

Chapter Meeting May 19th 2011

Sogeti Nederland B.V. Wildenborch 3, 1112 XB Diemen

Speaker:

Jim Manico is a managing partner of Infrared Security with over 15 years of professional web development experience.

Jim is also the chair of the OWASP connections committee, one of the project managers of the OWASP ESAPI project, a participant and manager of the OWASP Cheatsheet series, the producer and host of the OWASP Podcast Series, the manager of the OWASP Java HTML Sanitizer project and the manager of the OWASP Java Encoder project.

When not OWASP'ing, Jim lives on of island of Kauai with his lovely wife Tracey.

Abstract Title: The Ghost of XSS Past, Present and Future. A Defensive Tale.

Description: This talk will discuss the past methods used for XSS defense that were only partially effective.

Learning from these lessons, will will also discuss present day defensive methodologies that are effective, but place an undue burden on the developer.

We will then finish with a discussion of future XSS defense mythologies that shift the burden of XSS defense from the developer to various frameworks.

These include auto-escaping template technologies, browser-based defenses such as Content Security Policy, and Javascript sandboxes such as the Google CAJA project and JSReg