[Zac Franken] gave a good talk on authentication systems. (Card readers, biometric systems, etc). After a good introduction to various access control systems, he demoed an excellent exploit tool. Rather than focus on the access mechanism, he exploited the lack of reader installation security. Most card readers are secured by a plastic cover and a pair of screws. Inside, the reader wires are vulnerable. [Zac] put together the equivalent of a keyboard sniffer for the reader wiring. With this little device in place, he was able to collect access codes and use them to exploit the reader authentication system.

The operation goes like this: Install the sniffer. Let it collect some codes. On return, [Zac] is able to use his own card to become a pseudo authenticated card owner, restrict and allow access to other cards. That’s it. No sneaking up behind people to read their cards, just a few minutes with a screwdriver.

He’s not releasing the design, simply because measures to prevent this type of intercept/control mechanism would be extremely costly.

Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan from SPI Dynamics gave one of the more entertaining talks today. The title is an allusion to peoples willingness to apply new technology before they fully understand it. Instead of laughing at silly web 2.0 developers they decided to build their own AJAXified website by consulting the resources that any programmer would: AJAX books, blogs, and forums. What they ended up with was hackervactations.com… a security hole riddled gem built on good intentions.

Continue reading “Black Hat 2007 Premature AJAX-ulation” →

[J0hnny]’s at Blackhat and Defcon this year with his talk on “No-Tech Hacking”. It’s a fun talk that boils down to this: loads of information can be gathered using low tech methods. A small digital (or film) camera is ideal for shoulder surfing, identifying weaknesses, and assessing strengths.

The talk is pretty amusing – the commentary on the example shots is priceless. The concept has gone over so well at the cons that [J0hnny] has contributed a chapter to a book on risk management. You can grab a sample chapter here. It looks like he’ll be running his talk at 8pm on Friday at Defcon. From the sample chapter, I’d say that the book should be pretty good. It looks like a good introduction to social engineering and using your wits to defeat obstacles (like corporate security).