Black Hat Reveals BlueTooth, SSL Exploit Talks For July Show

[NOTE: Black Hat and Dark Reading are both part of UBM Tech. As the key July 27th-August 1st information security event in Las Vegas approaches, we'll be sharing information about the show directly from its creators here on Dark Reading.]

With just a handful of days left to Black Hat USA 2013's Friday early registration deadline, organizers have revealed a number of notable new talks -- just one of multiple updates debuting this week, since a large amount of high-profile Briefings content is being revealed.

This comes just after the announcement of the show's second keynote, in the form of Brian Muirhead, Chief Engineer, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and former manager of the Mars Pathfinder Mission, who will be giving an inspirational talk based on his amazing accomplishment with Pathfinder, "Take Risk, Don't Fail."

This time, we're focusing on three talks presented for the first time at Black Hat USA 2013, each of which dips into clever exploits and workarounds for major protocols -- from BlueTooth 4.0 through SSL to TLS sessions. Here's some more details on each of them:

-- In "Bluetooth Smart: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Fix!," iSec Partners' Mike Ryan presents a painstakingly researched talk on the widely used protocol. This talk not only shows the weaknesses (both bad and ugly, as noted!) of BlueTooth 4.0, it shows the tools to hack it and even how to prevent being sniffed yourself. And even better, in a growing trend at Black Hat, more and more researchers are including guidance on how to fix the discovered issue. So if you'd like to see a live demonstration of sniffing and recovering encryption keys using open-source tools Ryan and partners developed, alongside a clever fix to render the protocol secure against passive eavesdroppers, this'll be the lecture for you.

-- Next, we're focusing on "SSL, gone in 30 seconds – A BREACH beyond CRIME," presented by Angelo Prado and Neal Harris. This talk is particularly important because HTTPS gives consumers the feeling of safety. Security professionals look to SSL to provide a notion of identity (you know who you are talking to) and confidentiality (the stream of data is just for you and the server!). This talk shows how to reliably retrieve encrypted messages like session IDs, OAuth tokens, email addresses, and more via an exploit. The presenters then explain how you can protect against this type of attack, and will even release a tool, BREACH, at the end of the session to help the community test and mitigate.

-- Finally, "Truncating TLS sessions to violate beliefs" from Ben Smyth showcases attacks against a basic Internet communication security layer to do a number of eye-opening things. As Smyth explains, his research has "identified Web applications that fail to maintain order between TLS sessions ... thereby causing a desynchronization between the expected state of the user and server." As a result, Smyth shows how he can exploit the Helios electronic voting system to cast votes on behalf of honest voters, take full control of Microsoft Live accounts, and gain temporary access to Google accounts -- all substantive and notable exploits which will give major lessons to Web security development professionals.

More information about Black Hat USA 2013, which has a rapidly growing set of Briefings talks, as well as a comprehensive set of two- and four-day trainings, is available now -- early, reduced-rated registration is open until May 31st.