Rochester

Welcome to the OWASP Rochester Local Chapter

Welcome to the local Rochester chapter homepage. The chapter leader is Ralf Durkee

Participation

OWASP chapter meetings are free and open to anyone interested in application security. We encourage members to give presentations on specific topics and to contribute to the local chapter by sharing their knowledge with others. Prior to participating with OWASP please review the Chapter Rules.

The Rochester chapter has two mailing lists: one for announcements and one for general discussion. The announce list is for official communications (e.g meeting announcements, web site updates, etc). The discussion list is for general participation and everyone is encouraged to post. The announce mailing list can be found here. The discussion mailing list can be found here. You can also review the announce and discussion e-mail archives to see what folks have been talking about. Please make sure you are subscribed to announce to receive any last minute meeting info.

Local Officers

• President: Ralf Durkee
• Vice President: Chris Karr
• Secretary and Treasurer: Steve Buck
• Web and Communications: Andrea Cogliati

Meeting Dates & Location

Dates: The third Monday of every month, starting at 6:00 PM.

Types of events: Formal meeting (featuring a presentation) in odd numbered months, informal event (open forum with beer and wings) in even numbered months

Locations:

• Formal meetings at 1225 Jefferson Rd, Rochester, NY 14623 (near I-390) Google Maps
• Beer and wings at Mac Gregor's Grill & Tap Room, 300 Jefferson Rd, NY 14623 Google Maps

Formal meeting space is graciously offered by Bryant & Stratton College Enter the Frontier Commons plaza, near the Post Office. Towards the right, rear of the plaza is the PSC (Professional Skills Center) door, which is to the left of the main Bryant & Stratton entrance door. There will be a sign on the door indicating the room in which we will meet.

Please note that for informal meetings at Mac Gregor's, everybody needs to pay for their own food and drinks.

September Meeting Details

September meeting will be held on Monday September 22nd, 6pm at Bryant & Stratton College and will feature a videoconference with Jeff Williams, world famous webappsec guru, on verb tampering, EASPI library and the future of OWASP. You can't miss this one!

Presenter: Jeff Williams

Topic: Verb tampering and ESAPI

Bio: Jeff Williams is one of the major contributors in webappsec community. He has written many whitepapers, spoken at many conferences including Secure Software Summit, OWASP conferences, ISSA InfoSec Conference, NSA High Confidence Software and Systems Conference (HCSS), JavaOne, National Computer Security Conference (NCSC), etc, worked on several projects and written many tools available at OWASP (including creating the OWASP Top 10, WebGoat, Stinger, Secure Software Contract Annex, Honeycomb Project and the Enterprise Security API). Jeff has done a lot of work in promoting awareness of web application security. He's CEO of Aspect Security and also volunteers as chairs of OWASP Foundation. You can find more about him on his blog.

Abstract: The ESAPI is a free and open collection of all the security methods that a developer needs to build a secure web application. You can just use the interfaces and build your own implementation using your company's infrastructure. Or, you can use the reference implementation as a starting point. In concept, the API is language independent. However, the first deliverables from the project are a Java API and a Java reference implementation. Efforts to build ESAPI in .NET and PHP are already underway. Unfortunately, the available platforms, frameworks, and toolkits (Java EE, Struts, Spring, etc...) simply do not provide enough protection. This leaves developers with responsibility for designing and building security mechanisms. This reinventing the wheel for every application leads to wasted time and massive security holes. The cost savings through reduced development time, and the increased security due to using heavily analyzed and carefully designed security methods provide developers with a massive advantage over organizations that are trying to deal with security using existing ad hoc secure coding techniques. This API is designed to automatically take care of many aspects of application security, making these issues invisible to the developers.

Future Events

Oct 29-30 2008 - Rochester Security Summit 2008

The Rochester OWASP chapter in partnership with other Rochester institutions is organizing the third annual Rochester Security Summit Oct 29-30 during National Cyber Security Awareness Month. This year we'll have a full day dedicated to application security and we are are working to bring to Rochester the best national acclaimed speakers.

Visit Rochester Security Summit Site for details.

Past Presentations

May 2008 Database Encryption, by Ralf Durkee PPT

January 2008 SQL Injection and Dynamic SQL, by Andrea Cogliati ZIP

September 2007 2007 OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Vulnerabilities, by Ralph Durkee PowerPoint

October 2006 The first of the OWASP top ten: unvalidated input, by Steve Buck. PowerPoint

April 2006 PGP: Encryption for e-mail and web applications, by Ralph Durkee PDF

February 2006 Identity Theft, Phishing and Pharming, by Danny Allan PDF

February 2006 Secure e-mail, by Thomas Bullinger PDF

January 2006 PCI Compliance, by Pat Massey, Ralf Durkee, Maureen Baran PDF

September 2005 Two Factor Authentication for Java Applications with Client Certificates, by Ralf Durkee PDF Open Office

April 2005 Avoiding Backend Exploitation of Mail Forms, by Max Kessler PowerPoint Open Office

March 2005 Bringing Two-Factor Authentication to Web Applications, by Michael Starks PowerPoint Open Office

February 2005 Insecure Storage, by Chris Karr PowerPoint

January 2005 Access Control and Session Mgmnt, by Steve Buck PowerPoint Open Office

November 2004 Intro to OWASP by Ralf Durkee. Demonstration of SQL Injection attack and prevention, by Paul Cupo PowerPoint