Congratulations to:

Apptix

Hughes

Merkle

Sourcefire

EM7 at the Merkle NOC

And we must point out that Hughes topped the Maryland Technology Fast 50 list with an astounding growth rate of 138,762% over the past 5 years! Wow, it would be tough for any company in the world to beat that growth rate, but all kudos must go to Hughes and this incredible achievement. I’m sure we’ll see them on the National Technology Fast 500 list coming out soon.

Now I would like to say that without ScienceLogic and EM7 much of this would not have been possible, but of course that statement would be an incredible stretch. What I can say is that our product and our technology has had a profound impact on the operational efficiency for HughesNet, so perhaps you can give us, using a basketball analogy, 12 assists in the game.

Interesting to note, several other award winners are in the midst of product evaluations as we speak. I think that EM7 Meta-Appliances are a strategic weapon within each of these businesses to leverage our technology in interesting ways which create huge organizational value and operational efficiencies.

So to all those companies who have won this year… a BIG congratulations from the bottom of my heart. For our existing customers who made the list this year… keep working hard so you can make it again next year. For ScienceLogic, stay tuned in: We were not quite big enough to make the list last year, however I am very excited about our growth in 2008 and am quietly confident that you will see us on the Virginia Fast 50 list next year!

I was just reminded of this randomly just by reading this list of new tools released at the Defcon this year. Sounds like a busy conference, with a lot of hackers who love what they do. Good stuff.

It has become more like a global fair than what most people think of conferences; even the badge is highly unique. I say this because there are so many things to do at DEFCON, other than going to talks, that you could spend your whole weekend looking at the “World’s Largest Boar!” so to speak. One of the CTF (Capture the Flag) contest winners this year actually exclaimed that he only made it to 2 talks in 12 years! I am also one of those individuals who barely get a chance to go to talks and now that the speaker pool is so diverse it’s hard to find all of the “stuff” they release.

Read the list and full article here

My favorite talk, as expected, was the Sotirov/Dowd talk on How To Impress Girls With Browser Memory Protection Bypasses. The attack is a conceptually simple, yet completely reliable technique for exploiting vulnerabilities in web browsers. Of course, the media has sensationalized the impact of their findings, but ultimately, this is still significant as far as browser-based exploits are concerned. It’s worth mentioning that part of the technique allowing them to load a .NET DLL at an arbitrary location under Vista was reliant on an implementation bug wherein the OS disables ASLR if the version in the .NET COR header was below a certain value. However, the address space spraying and stack spraying techniques are likely to be extended to other platforms utilizing similar memory protection mechanisms.

As for the girls? I can report first-hand that the ladies at TAO on Wednesday night were hanging on Alex’s every word. They were particularly impressed when he whipped out the laptop for a live demo. Unfortunately, none of the dozen iPhone owners in the immediate vicinity thought to snap a picture (too busy Twittering). Oh well.

I also enjoyed Hovav Shacham’s talk on return-oriented programming. Simply put, he described a generalization of the return-to-libc shellcode approach with the intent to demonstrate that one could achieve Turing-complete computation using “found code” in process images. By chaining together series of mini-computations ending in return (RET) instructions, it was possible to build higher-level programming constructs such as branches and loops. The nature of the x86 instruction set provides some flexibility because instructions are interpreted differently depending on how you align the instruction pointer (i.e. the old shellcode trick of searching the process image for any JMP EBX instruction and using that as your EIP). In RISC architectures such as SPARC, however, you don’t have that luxury; if your %pc isn’t aligned properly you get a bus error. So it was quite interesting to see that they were able to extend the concept to RISC. The practicality of the attack technique is limited by the fact that the shellcode is tuned to a particular binary image — if the shellcode was built using instructions extrapolated from glibc 2.3.5, it won’t work for a system running glibc 2.4.

I thought Scott Stender’s talk on Concurrency Attacks in Web Applications was interesting as well. In a nutshell, spewing thousands of simultaneous requests at web application transactions that are not thread-safe can create interesting problems. In the presentation, Scott ran his demo against a VM running on the attack machine. I found myself wondering how effective the same attack would be over the Internet — would it be significantly less reliable (or not at all)? Race conditions are generally easier to exploit locally than remotely due to more predictable execution conditions. Certainly this is an under-tested vulnerability class though.

One presentation I wasn’t able to attend but want to follow up on is Nate McFeters, John Heasman, and Rob Carter’s talk which discussed the GIFAR attack I’ve been hearing so much about lately. The gist is that you can create a file that is both a valid GIF and a valid JAR, then use some Java applet tricks to initiate HTTP requests on behalf of the victim.

Finally, the Pwnie Awards didn’t fail to disappoint. Drama ensued over the Most Overhyped award, but at least this year some of the winners showed up to claim their awards! Halvar rapping Symantec lyrics was also quite memorable.

All in all, a fun and informative week, but as usual, I was relieved to get the hell out of Vegas and head home on Friday morning.

P.S. For a much more entertaining BlackHat/Defcon Recap, read Jennifer Jabbusch’s account of the week’s events. It’s my favorite one so far!

My favorite talk, as expected, was the Sotirov/Dowd talk on How To Impress Girls With Browser Memory Protection Bypasses. The attack is a conceptually simple, yet completely reliable technique for exploiting vulnerabilities in web browsers. Of course, the media has sensationalized the impact of their findings, but ultimately, this is still significant as far as browser-based exploits are concerned (here is a more accurate report). It’s worth mentioning that part of the technique allowing them to load a .NET DLL at an arbitrary location under Vista was reliant on an implementation bug wherein the OS disables ASLR if the version in the .NET COR header was below a certain value. However, the address space spraying and stack spraying techniques are likely to be extended to other platforms utilizing similar memory protection mechanisms.

As for the girls? I can report first-hand that the ladies at TAO on Wednesday night were hanging on Alex’s every word. They were particularly impressed when he whipped out the laptop for a live demo. Unfortunately, none of the dozen iPhone owners in the immediate vicinity thought to snap a picture (too busy Twittering). Oh well.

I also enjoyed Hovav Shacham’s talk on return-oriented programming. Simply put, he described a generalization of the return-to-libc shellcode approach with the intent to demonstrate that one could achieve Turing-complete computation using “found code” in process images. By chaining together series of mini-computations ending in return (RET) instructions, it was possible to build higher-level programming constructs such as branches and loops. The nature of the x86 instruction set provides some flexibility because instructions are interpreted differently depending on how you align the instruction pointer (i.e. the old shellcode trick of searching the process image for any JMP EBX instruction and using that as your EIP). In RISC architectures such as SPARC, however, you don’t have that luxury; if your %pc isn’t aligned properly you get a bus error. So it was quite interesting to see that they were able to extend the concept to RISC. The practicality of the attack technique is limited by the fact that the shellcode is tuned to a particular binary image — if the shellcode was built using instructions extrapolated from glibc 2.3.5, it won’t work for a system running glibc 2.4.

I thought Scott Stender’s talk on Concurrency Attacks in Web Applications was interesting as well. In a nutshell, spewing thousands of simultaneous requests at web application transactions that are not thread-safe can create interesting problems. In the presentation, Scott ran his demo against a VM running on the attack machine. I found myself wondering how effective the same attack would be over the Internet — would it be significantly less reliable (or not at all)? Race conditions are generally easier to exploit locally than remotely due to more predictable execution conditions. Certainly this is an under-tested vulnerability class though.

One presentation I wasn’t able to attend but want to follow up on is Nate McFeters, John Heasman, and Rob Carter’s talk which discussed the GIFAR attack I’ve been hearing so much about lately. The gist is that you can create a file that is both a valid GIF and a valid JAR, then use some Java applet tricks to initiate HTTP requests on behalf of the victim.

Finally, the Pwnie Awards didn’t fail to disappoint. Drama ensued over the Most Overhyped award, but at least this year some of the winners showed up to claim their awards! Halvar rapping Symantec lyrics was also quite memorable.

All in all, a fun and informative week, but as usual, I was relieved to get the hell out of Vegas and head home on Friday morning.

P.S. For a much more entertaining BlackHat/Defcon Recap, read Jennifer Jabbusch’s account of the week’s events. It’s my favorite one so far!

LAS VEGAS -- Last weekend, more than 9,000 hackers, freaks, feds and geeks gathered for the 16th annual DefCon, the world's largest computer security convention.

Wired.com brought you live coverage of the most newsworthy events at DefCon 16. Here are some photos from the lighter side of the conference.

Left: South Korean hackers compete in the Capture the Flag competition. The goal is to hack into and keep control of targeted servers.

Mr. Sinister and Dragon Cracker battle it out in a round of Guitar Hero -- one of DefCon's newest competitions.

Bringing-your-own-booze supply ensures optimal buzz at DefCon. Shortly after this picture was taken, hotel security escorted this backpack-hacker to his room.

Computer geeks from the National Institute of Standards and Technology set up a network secured with quantum encryption in a conference room at DefCon. The quantum-entangled photons are being used to encrypt a video stream across a line-of-site network.

A compact optical bench and an atomic clock (left) are used to secure a network with quantum encryption.

In the Lock Pick Pavilion, DefCon attendees Dustin, Jennalynn and Kunfoozball practice their lock-picking skills.

DefCon founder and organizer Jeff Moss, aka Dark Tangent, at the conference's closing ceremony Sunday.

A collection of black badges awaits the winners of the various competitions. These badges give their holders lifetime entry to DefCon.

One of DefCon's logos, the smiley-faced skull and crossbones, is welded inside a yellow sphere. The sphere is the primary stage of one of the most difficult competitions at DefCon: The Mystery Challenge.

Unbeknownst to attendees, this laptop is sniffing RFID tags and taking photos of their owners when they pass in front of the detectors. RFID tags are used in everything from building access to some credit cards.

At the closing ceremony, DefCon organizers turn off the lights while the attendees wave their high-tech badges back and forth.

I would guess that every one of you reading this blog have a stock portfolio with 5 to 10 individual stocks or mutual funds. There are more than 5,000 publicly listed companies to choose from, and another 5,000 mutual funds. But, out of 10,000 possible companies you chose 10 to invest in. Why? Why did you reject the other 9,990 companies? Obviously there are more than 10 good companies to invest in. Other investors chose to invest their money in the other 9,990 companies…why not you?

I suppose the difference must be that many investors aren’t actively involved in their investments (maybe entrepreneurs are more so, since they have to know a certain investment space quite well)…

It sounds to me a lot like the editorial selection process for book manuscripts, articles, and so forth — editors receive a ton of submissions and they have to be choosy. Sometimes they don’t pick winners; sometimes they pick losers. More importantly, each has a personal style, opinions, preferences, and they are trying to appeal to a certain audience. It’s interesting to think that VCs are similar but makes sense–the end question of “What will be successful” really depends on the consumer base and industry, and VCs are just people who probably know and prefer to interact with a certain type of consumer base or audience.

Our paper has now been announced as a runner-up for the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award. The prize is presented annually, for research which makes an outstanding contribution to the field. Microsoft, the sponsor of the award, have further details and summaries of the papers in their press release.

Congratulations to the winners, Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, for “Robust De-Anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets”; and the other runner-ups, Mira Belenkiy, Melissa Chase, C. Chris Erway, John Jannotti, Alptekin Küpçü, Anna Lysyanskaya and Erich Rachlin, for “Making P2P Accountable without Losing Privacy”.