Blog Posts

BlackHat 2010 – Slides / Paper / Rest..

Hello. How ’bout that ride in? I guess that’s why they call it Sin City. [1] BlackHat this year passed in a blur. In retrospect staying in Vegas for only 3 nights was probably a bad idea. (This is especially obvious when you consider that the round trip involves about 60 hours of travelling time) I got in and mostly hid in my room working on the talk. I did the talk, and promptly hid in my room feeling sick

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Viva las Vegas?

July in information security means Vegas heat, dark t-shirts and “BlackHat“. Over the year there have been many new infosec conferences, but BlackHat remains the premier event for the infosec community. In a few minutes, i’ll start the >24hour journey towards the insanity^2 (Vegas is crazy, and the injection of the Defcon crew just dials up the crazy-meter). My talk this year turns me into infosec historian: “Memory Corruption Attacks: The (almost) Complete History… Buffer Overflows, Stack Smashes and Memory

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Conference on Cyber Conflict – Slides..

The CCDCOE (Cooperative Cyber DefenceCentre of Excellence) held its Conference on Cyber Conflict in Tallinn, Estonia. It was an interesting opportunity to see some of the issues that lurk beneath the “CyberWar” banner. Charlie Miller (of pwn2own fame) and i were invited to talk about things from an attackers perspective. Both our talks avoid the question of “Is the threat real?” (Which i think was answered awesomely by the talk given by Bryan Krekel and George Bakos of Northrop Grumman),

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200 Young South Africans you must take to Lunch

The Mail & Guardian published their 2010 list of “200 Young South Africans you must take to Lunch“. According to their page: “These are young people who will shape our country in the decades to come, in the sporting arena, in public life and in business.” I made the list under Technology, which was really quite flattering. (thanks M&G, @singe) Deels forced me to attend the lunch (which i would normally have found an excuse to avoid), and i was

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Memory Corruption and Hacker Folklore

A while back i thought it would be nice if we had an authoritative source of memory corruption attacks (and mitigations) in a single document. I resisted mainly because: It seemed like a lot of drudgery for something we have been able to do well without, It steers towards the word “taxonomy” [1] I was a little lazy. [1] Dave Aitel has posited that “people who thing (sic) of things as “Taxonomies” are always headed in the opposite direction from

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Vicarious Success

With the Champions League reaching it’s crescendo, and 2010 being a world cup year, it’s hard to get away from sports mania. I can understand national pride and I can even understand the joy of a good match. (I was sport crazy through high school/university and sometimes played up to 3 organized football marches per week (for different teams in different leagues)). What I don’t get is the insanely fanatical talk of “my team did X” or the even stranger

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"Your submission for Black Hat USA 2010 was accepted"

It doesn’t matter how many conferences you present at, or how much you hate LasVegas, around this time of the year those are very happy, welcome words. I’ll pop more details on the talk here in a few days (especially since I’m hoping to co-opt some of you). Interestingly enough, despite almost a decade of Blackhat/Defcon’s, it’s the first time I’ll be free to take a training class. I’m pretty stoked! /mh

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Memory Corruption and Hacker Folklore

A while back i thought it would be nice if we had an authoritative source of memory corruption attacks (and mitigations) in a single document. I resisted mainly because: It seemed like a lot of drudgery for something we have been able to do well without, It steers towards the word “taxonomy” [1] I was a little lazy. [1] Dave Aitel has posited that “people who thing (sic) of things as “Taxonomies” are always headed in the opposite direction from correct” Late

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(YaTT) Yet another Twitter Tool ?

I wanted to play with Django, so built this “toy” project to kick the tires. If you are on twitter (and don’t protect your tweets), check out http://fun.thinkst.com/land. It’s a very simple application that will grab a list of the people you follow, then grab the list of everyone they follow, to give you the top n% of people they follow that you dont. My favorite feedback on it so far was: @narvanitis: wow i dont follow @mdowd Reason enough

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Cargo Cult Startups

While talking to someone on IRC today, i mentioned that lot’s of young companies (and some old ones) are Cargo Cult Startups.. I was asked to explain (which is a sure fire sign that someone hasn’t been reading their Feynman), but figured i could probably elaborate. In his commencement speech at CalTech (and in his book “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman“) RPF talks about Cargo Cult Science. He was referring to Pacific Islanders, who having seen the planes landing from

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