IT Security 
IT Security Meta
Internet connectivity issues kept me from being timely in updating, and a need for sleep upon my return led me to soak up all of the rest of BSides and DEFCON. That means just a few talks are going to be brought up.
First, there’s Moxie Marlinspike‘s talk about SSL. In my last post, I had mentioned that I thought SSL has reached the point where it is due to be replaced. In the time between writing that and seeing his talk, I talked with a few other security folk. We all agreed that DNSSEC made for a better distribution model than the current SSL system, and wondered before seeing Moxie’s presentation why he would add so much more complexity beyond that. The guy next to me (I’ll skip name drops, but he’s got a security.stackexchange.com shirt now and was all over the news in the last year) and I talked before his presentation, and at the end agreed that Moxie’s point about trusting the DNS registry and operators to not change keys could be a mistake.
Thus, we’re still in the world of certificates and complicated x.509 parsing that has a lot of loopholes, and we’ve moved added something that the user needs to be aware of. However, we have one solid bonus: many independent and distributed sources must now collaborate to verify a secure connection. If one of them squawks, you at least have an opportunity to be aware. An equally large entry exists in the negative column: it is likely that many security professionals themselves won’t enjoy the added complexity. There’s still a lot of research work to be done, however the discussion is needed now.
PCI came up in discussion a little bit last year, and a lot more this year. In relation, the upcoming Penetration Testing Execution Standard was discussed. Charlie Vedaa gave a talk at BSides titled “Fuck the Penetration Testing Execution Standard”. It was a frank and open talk with a quick vote at the end: the room as a whole felt that despite the downsides we see structures like PCI and the PTES, we were better off with them than without.
The line for DEFCON badges took most people hours and the conference was out of the hard badges in the first day. Organizers say it wasn’t an issue of under-ordering, but rather that they had exhausted the entire commercial supply of “commercially pure” titanium to make the badges. Then the madness started…
AT&T’s network had its back broken under the strain of DEFCON resulting in tethering being useless and text messages showing up in batches sometimes more than 30 minutes late. The Rio lost its ability to check people into their hotel rooms or process credit cards. Some power issues affected the neighboring hotel at a minimum — Gold Coast had a respectable chunk of casino floor and restaurant space in the dark last evening. The audio system for the Rio’s conference area was apparently taken control of and the technicians locked out of their own system. Rumors of MITM cellular attacks at the conference, and now days later in the press abound. Given talks last year including a demonstration and talks this week at the Chaos Computer Camp, the rumors are credible. We’ll wait to see evidence, though.
DEFCON this year likely had more than 15,000 attendees, and they hit the hotel with an unexpected force. Restaurants were running out of food. Talks were sometimes packed beyond capacity. The Penn and Teller theater was completely filled for at least three talks I had interest in, locking me outside for one of them. The DEFCON WiFi network (the “most hostile in the world”) suffered some odd connectivity issues and a slow-or-dead DHCP server.
Besides a few articles in the press that have provided interesting public opinion, one enterprising person asked a few random non-attendees at the hotel what they thought of the event. The results are… enlightening.