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Performance thoughts
by Dave Aitel 29 Apr '23

29 Apr '23

So my first thought is that performance measurement tools seem exactly aimed at a lot of security problems but performance people are extremely reluctant <https://aus.social/@brendangregg/110276319669838295> to admit that because of the drama involved in the security market. Which is very smart of them! :) Secondly, I wanted to re-link to Halvar's QCon keynote <https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wOT5kOWkQybVTHzB7uLXpU39ctYzXpOs2xV…>. He has a section on the difficulties of getting good performance benchmarks, which typically you would do as part of your build chain. So in theory, you have a lot of compilation features you can twiddle when compiling and you want to change those values, compile your program, and get a number for how fast it is. But this turns out to basically be impossible in the real world for reasons I'll let him explain in his presentation (see below). [image: image.png] A lot of these problems with performance seem only solvable by a continuous process of evolutionary algorithms - where you have a population of different compilation variables, and you probably introduce new ones over time, and you kill off the cloud VMs where you're getting terrible performance under real-world situations and let the ones getting good or average performance thrive. I'm sure this is being done, and probably if I listened to more of Dino dai Zovi's talks I'd know where and how, but aside from having performance implications, it also has security implications because it will tend towards offering offensive implants value for becoming less parasitic and more symbiotic. -dave

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LSU is hiring CS Professors with RE and binary exploitation experience
by Andrew Case 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

The Computer Science department at Louisiana State University (LSU) is currently hiring for many faculty positions related to applied cyber security. Courses taught inside this department include reverse engineering, malware analysis, binary exploitation, memory forensics and other intensive courses related to incident response and offensive security. Ideal candidates will have significant experience with deeply technical areas of cybersecurity. LSU was recently granted the CAE-CO designation and is one of only 21 schools nation-wide to hold it as it is the most technical designation granted by NSA and DHS. The department also runs a large SFS program for cyber security students. If you are interested in one of these positions, then please see the following link. I also ask my industry contacts to please spread the word within academic communities that you have access to: https://lsu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/LSU/job/3325-Patrick-F-Taylor-Hall/… The cybersecurity effort at LSU has strong support from the highest levels of the school and is rapidly expanding – so now is the perfect time to join. PS: I am not employed by LSU, but do work very closely with the CS department to ensure the courses are relevant to industry and rigorous enough for students to leave with real-world, hands-on experience. If you have questions related to the position, then please direct them to Dr. Golden Richard at LSU: https://www.cct.lsu.edu/~golden/ Thanks, Andrew

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t2'23: Call For Papers 2023 (Helsinki, Finland)
by Tomi Tuominen 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

Call For Papers 2023 Tired of your bosses suspecting conference trips to exotic locations being just a ploy to partake in Security Vacation Club? Prove them wrong by coming to Helsinki, Finland on May 4-5 2023! Guaranteed lack of sunburn, good potential for rain or slush. In case of great spring weather, though, no money back. CFP and registration both open. Read further if still unsure. Maui, Miami, Las Vegas, Tel Aviv or Wellington feel so much sunnier once you’ve experienced the lack of infinity pools in Northern Europe. Instead of pools and palms trees, we can offer you actual saunas and a high tech environment, which is a weird combination of demoscene, widespread Linux adoption, mobile Internet with uncapped flat rate data and a long history of IRC and imageboards. What defines a conference? For t2 it has always been that intimate welcoming atmosphere of a small event, which makes both audience and speakers approachable. There are enough regulars to create the feeling of a community, but not too many that a first-comer would feel being left out. On the content side, we have always been and always will be a technical security conference, emphasizing the cutting edge, world class research. This is an event for the community. Our focus[1] is on technical excellence, not politics or player hating. t2’23 offers you an audience with a taste for technical security presentations containing original content. This is your chance to showcase the latest research and lessons in EDR simulation and healthcheck spoofing, hardware insecurity, inferring information from interference, cloud-scale forensics or persistance automation, new vulnerability classes, AI exploitation, virtual machines inside parsers, elegant exploitation of old vulnerability classes, modern defense, dropping zero days during presentations, state of the art memory corruption mitigation bypasses, evasions, safe cracking, satellite and space security, remote vehicle access, or whatever research lights up the eyes of seasoned conference visitors. For the hackers by the hackers. The advisory board will be reviewing submissions until 2023-03-17. Slide deck submission final deadline 2023-04-20 for accepted talks. First come, first served. Submissions will not be returned. Quick facts for speakers + presentation length 60-120 minutes, in English + complimentary travel and accommodation for one person[6] + decent speaker hospitality benefits + no marketing or product propaganda Still not sure if this is for you? Check out the blast from the past[2]. The total amount of attendees, including speakers and organizers is limited to 99. Advisory Board recognize[3] the OG Finnish sauna culture is an acquired taste and can promise the lack of sweaty, partially or fully nude sauna-goers at all conference functions. [0] hunter2 [1] https://t2.fi/about/eula/ [2] https://t2.fi/schedules/ [3] https://youtu.be/Oj8JBBAM5jY?t=40 [6] except literally @nudehaberdasher and @0xcharlie How to submit Fill out the form at https://if.t2.fi/action/cfp How to register Buy your ticket at https://t2.fi/registration/

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Chapter 2
by Dave Aitel 05 Sep '22

05 Sep '22

(Note, this is a continuation of our previous story chapter since sometimes it's more fun to read fiction than to wonder what's going on these days with Cloudflare or whatever. https://lists.aitelfoundation.org/archives/list/dailydave@lists.aitelfounda… ) Chapter 2 _________________________________________________ Landing in Miami is like visiting a tier of hell just below Limbo. It is not saturated in evil so much as the established gateway to more evil places. As you disembark from your flight you can almost see a direct line from providing no-questions-asked banking to drug dealers in the eighties, to offering an endless series of apartments (aka money hiding spots) to the Venezualan upper class, to the current endless series of crypto companies headquartered in the newly hip Brickle office spaces next to SmileDirect and fancy brew pubs. In the sense that NYC deals in finances, San Francisco in software companies, Boston in "higher education", Miami is more about your more generic small-scale scams as the underlying substrate upon which the rest of the economy is based. The tropics engender a sort of flexibility and adaptability which is about finding new scam-niches and exploiting them before anyone else has caught on. But your meeting here is not about crypto-coin or real estate built with permeable concrete guaranteed to spall in the face of salt-water-laden winds. It's with a company building testing software of all things. "Boring is rewarding" you say to yourself, as you drive past a literal graveyard to a small joint called "Hush" which you give an approving nod to. Hush serves fried alligator, which tastes like fried anything, as you sit across from your lunch companions, Stewart and Amy. They are drinking beers you've never heard of, and they lay out their scheme, without regard to OPSEC since nobody in this restaurant other than you would likely understand it. "We've been building a large set of unit testing libraries for cryptographic primitives, lots of complicated string building stuff, machine learning, you name it." "Great." You say. "Always good to have quality testing libraries". But they exchange a look and you realize you've misinterpreted them. "Our public libraries have a tendency to ... sometimes think things are very well written and secure when they are ... not. It's just sometimes our unit testing has bugs, you know? We have really good documentation in a lot of languages though. And great support. 24/7. Discord, Slack, forums, you name it." "So the theory here is you don't target any particular software in the supply chain? You just encourage bad testing practices?" You're pondering their value, while at the same time trying to think about what alligator actually tastes like under all the grease. The flavor, as far as you can determine, is "Chewy". Stewart struggles for a second to get the words out, like a huge machine optimized for literally anything other than the current task of explaining things to other humans using words. "Sometimes it's best when the check to see if ASLR is enabled doesn't actually work, so your bugs that you find have a chance to be exploitable. We're not in the business of putting bugs in things. We just make the bugs you do have....better." "I see. What about code we actually want to be secure?" "I recommend everyone local uses our FIPS certified library, which, admittedly, is expensive and does the same thing as our free code, but maybe with more effort put into the actual tests themselves." Amy says this to you without any hint of chicanery, as if this is a simple fact, almost not worth saying. It is, you realise, a very tropical CONOP. "I will make sure this is required by various regulations after you are funded. I'll have my team send you the paperwork." you say. And with that, the conversation moves to pleasant nonsense as you internally contemplate your next flight - out of here and into the cold. -dave

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"Market Failures"
by Dave Aitel 26 Aug '22

26 Aug '22

If you were at a talk at Defcon this year in the Policy track, you probably heard someone talk about how they, as a government official, are there to address "market failures". And immediately you thought: This is a load of nonsense. Because that government official is not allowed to, and has no intentions of, addressing any market failures whatsoever. If the Government was going to address market failures, they'd have to find some way to convince every cloud provider from making their security features the upsell on the Platinum package. They'd have to talk about how trying to get into different markets means every social media company faces huge pressures to put Indian spies on their network. Obviously you know, as someone who did not emerge from under a rock into the security community yesterday, that the answer to having a malicious insider on your network is probably some smart segmentation, which we call "Zero Trust" now. But Zero Trust is expensive! And most social media companies are not exactly profitable as the great monster known as TikTok has eaten every eyeball in every market because the very concept of having people explicitly choose who their friends are is outdated now. In fact, as everyone is pointing out, almost all companies you know are in this position! They're cutting costs by sending jobs overseas while spending huge amounts of money propping up their stock prices and paying their executives to sell them to a dwindling market of buyers. Private Equity companies spend every effort on squeezing the last dollar out of old enterprise software by exploiting the lock-in they have on small businesses. And as critical as Twitter is, we have the exact same dynamic with our privatized water and power companies - who have no plans to make strategic investments in security or anything really - which is why on public calls you can hear them humiliating themselves asking Jen Easterly to absorb the entire costs of their security programs. The ideal practice for all of these companies is to offload their costs onto the taxpayer, which is why instead of investing in security, they cry for the FBI to go collect their bitcoin from whatever ransomware crews are on their network this week using offensive cyber operations that themselves cost the government an order of magnitude more than the bitcoin is worth. As you're sitting in that Defcon talk, listening to someone from government talk about how they only want to regulate with the "input of industry" or something, you have to wonder: if this is every company we know, maybe the market failure isn't just how hard it is to buy a good security product because they all abuse the copyright system to avoid any kind of performance transparency. Maybe it's also how hard it is to SELL a good security product because every single company is trying to cut their budget to the exact minimum amount that will allow them to tell the FBI they did their best, and the FBI needs to go out there and pick up their slack. -dave

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Defcon 30
by Dave Aitel 23 Aug '22

23 Aug '22

As you wander the halls of the inaptly named Caesar's Forum, amidst a living sea of the most neurodiverse Clan humanity has ever seen, you cannot help but stop for a second to close your eyes amidst the cacophony and mentally exclaim, "Look. Look at the world we have created!" Sitting in the one cafe in the Paris hotel with food, a tattooed thirty-something who has been to Defcon twice gives you advice on how to do the conference. "Take the unirail." they say. "Also, you should have a hacker name! Mine is 'youngblood''" "Noted!" you respond. These are good ideas. The unirail in particular, probably, because Vegas is overflowing - and decent food options and anywhere to sit that is not beeping at you or showing grungy dystopian TV ads the Cyberpunk 2077 developers would find over-the-top are impossible to come by, making the conference ten times more exhausting than usual. In that sense, you miss the Alexis Park days, sitting with Halvar Flake next to a pool where everyone was more larval than they knew, watching Dildog lauch BO2K to a thousand screaming fans in the same room Dino Dai Zovi explained Solaris hacking an hour earlier. Some of the best talks this year had no attendees at all - Orange Tsai's talk was over Zoom, to a huge room, but with few butts in the seats. There were a hundred "Villages" it seemed like, living a half-life between physical space in the conference room and a Discord channel. Defcon may be the worst and best place to learn anything in that way - the environment is hopelessly chaotic, with two talks happening inches away from each other, and only feet from a DJ pumping out house music. But perhaps the best environment to learn in is the one in which you are most inspired? My friends, we've conquered the world. What's next? -dave

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Phase changes in international relations
by Dave Aitel 23 Aug '22

23 Aug '22

Right now, there is a, to put it mildly, ongoing discussion between proponents of coercion and deterrence in cyber policy, and adherents of a new theory, called *persistent engagement.* Maybe the sum total of the people in the argument is less than a thousand, but as academic circles go, it heavily influences the US Defense Department and IC, and through that, the rest of the world, so it is fun to watch. Also obviously it has added to infosec Twitter drama, which of course is the most important thing in the whole Universe. But while I try to keep this list technical, I wanted to put it into context for people here, so they can better appreciate the Twitter drama. But before I do that, I want to talk about a Defcon talk I attended. I'm not going to say WHICH talk, since it was under Chatham House Rule, but it was about cyber policy. When I pressed someone on an aspect of their policy efforts and how it implicated technical experts without involving their feedback (export control around penetration testing tools) they said "Well, that was more an expression of our country's VALUES and so we didn't need to listen to our technical experts". And I thought that was very interesting! Because the technical community is highly connected and paying attention to these sorts of things in a way that didn't used to be the case. If your message on one issue is going to be "When our values and the technical community's values don't align, we don't bother listening to them" then they will all know immediately, and all your other outreach efforts might as well be wasted air. And this is true across the board - disintermediation via cyber is now a universal truth. I believe you can come at the theories of persistent engagement by looking at it from a different perspective: Instead of saying "Here's a bunch of data about what we see in cyber, and it looks a certain way, and that way requires a new way of thinking" you ask yourself whether the fundamental way of dealing with conflict in international relations literature can be simplified down to coercion and deterrence when the system is a highly connected network. In other words, the game theory math you would use for dyads and bilateral relationships is great for looking at nuclear conflict because that's how the problem is presented, but doesn't scale to the problems we have for cyber conflicts, which are about emergent effects of much more complicated systems. That's why it's not just different, but downright wrong, to talk about offense-defense balances when we look at cyber or cyber-enabled conflicts. It's why the previous international relations work on deterrence and coercion just doesn't apply cleanly, if at all. On one side (the wrong side) you have people saying "Cyber is not strategic because it cannot hold ground like infantry can!" and on the other side you have people building international relations theories based on cycles of attack, on responses and counter-responses to aggression in the cyber domain because you can lead an entire country around by the nose ring that is TikTok. At some level, we are going to have to stop talking about offensive cyber operations as a corollary of SIGINT capability, and going to look more holistically at COGINT. To sum it up: Complexity in connectivity introduces phase changes in systems. We now live in a highly connected world, and this means we need new paradigms of international relations, whether you are under Chatham House Rule or not. -dave

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The top of the whale
by Dave Aitel 25 Jun '22

25 Jun '22

People think that finding vulnerabilities is about finding holes in code. But at some level it's not really about that. It's about understanding that the code itself is a hole in the swirling chaos of the world and just letting a little bit of that chaos in allows you to illuminate the whole thing. Spending time in Seattle is a little bit like buying a pair of high-powered binoculars to look down the train tracks at that weird light that's heading towards you. Seattle is a city perpetually timeless and jet lagged - as far away as a giraffe's head from the country's dual beating hearts of New York City and DC. The city rests on an absolute bedrock of code. Code that feeds on lives everywhere as voraciously and implacably as a blue whale gulping krill. In that sense, the inhabitants of Seattle are those who have realized it's better to be on top of the whale than inside it. It is perhaps why all the architecture is as boxy as an early software package. If you pulled the lid of any of the buildings next to the water you might see the packaging for a Windows 95 CD ROM, or a bunch of floppies with a forgotten database. When you go running past all these horribly efficient buildings down to the water on the lone sunny day, you will be surprised with a bunch of naked people, stripping down next to an old industrial park turned into a playground, covering themselves in body paint before some eldritch streaking ritual for the parade over the hill. Around them buzz photographers immortalizing the moment. Memes infecting other memes like an endless series of smaller wasp larvae. Flying back to Miami, amongst the bridal parties and vacationers, over an endless survey of drying rivers and lakes, the ravages of unchecked climate change exposing raw pale edges the exact beige color of army pants. The whole country - a patchwork tinderbox of exposed nerves. With the right kind of eyes you can see a little bit of chaos being let in. -dave

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Using microarchitecture bugs to beat authenticated pointers.
by Dave Aitel 12 Jun '22

12 Jun '22

If you've walked through the Underworld long enough, you've run into demons. Or maybe it's the other way around - by running into enough demons, you might realize you are walking through the Underworld. And by making friends with them, if you are lucky, you might realize you are a demon yourself. [image: image.png] My brother in Zeus - this is just tempting the Fates. Every so often an exploit from the Underworld is found. Maybe one or two a year is dragged screaming curses in a long-dead language out into the sunlight, pinned against a Kaspersky GReaT blogpost, and vivasected for the world. Sometimes these are simple bugs, with complex exploitation chains. Sometimes these are complex bugs, but with reliable simple exploit chains. Occasionally you see a host of bugs, all linked together like fire ants fording a stream. If you've walked through the Underworld enough you'll simply nod in recognition of them, perhaps stop to admire the artwork of the Runes carved into their skins by some unknown spellcrafter. My point is this: it doesn't matter what the real-world utility is for an exploit, because demons don't care. They operate partially in the future, perhaps. Or maybe ignoring real-world utility evolved as a sense of necessity of staying ahead of the eyes hunting for them. I'm not sure. But my rule - a core axiom of persistent engagement - is that if it can be done, it is being done already. -dave

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Computer Science
by Dave Aitel 27 May '22

27 May '22

I remember when fuzzing was just sending long strings to RPC programs, and tapping the cloaca of all Unix programs, the signal handler, to see what came out. But now, to be a hacker, you have to be a scientist. Computer science is a real thing. But most computer scientists I know can't explain how to do it because it comes out sounding like a deep dive into a dungeons and dragons campaign run by toddlers. And perhaps, the hardest thing with computer science is knowing when you're stuck, when the noise inherent in your system has overwhelmed the signal, and hence, you. Really I lied. The hardest thing is knowing when someone else on your team is stuck and being able to reach into their understanding of the System and unstick them. Because science, like digestion, is a team sport. You can, if you want, undertake fun experiments. For example, you could as a hacker just say publicly what 0day you know are sitting around, waiting to be found. You can be as loud and annoying about it as possible, then just wait a few years and see if there are any cool BlackHat talks on the subject <https://www.blackhat.com/us-20/briefings/schedule/#room-for-escape-scribbli…> or not, and if the market makes any particular changes to how it deals with that technology. There will not be any. This might make you ask more questions - more uncomfortable ones. "What is an acceptable parasitic load in a system?" you might ask in this way. In the animal kingdom, it is an astonishing 40% <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/animals-evolution-parasi….>. In computers, it is probably the same, where the science of hacking is equally ignored and reviled, both profitable and prophetless. Most hackers you know are specialized in the mystic art of Transformation. A heap overrun becomes an information leak which becomes code execution. A denial of service becomes a side channel attack becomes a local privilege escalation. Sometimes it's hard to see the science in this. A friend of yours will look down upon it as "just engineering". But it's not enough to just find one bug anymore, or even one transformation of a single bug. Every bug must pass through multiple slits at the same time now, like a lost waveform. This takes some science. My point is this: If you think you are defending against Engineers, but really you are defending against Scientists, you've already lost. And if a country wants to build and maintain offensive power in cyberspace, it has to understand how to care for and nurture the places that treat it as a science. -dave

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