Five Briefings You Should Not Miss at Blackhat USA 2015

This week the Incapsula security team is heading en masse to Blackhat USA 2015, in Las Vegas, NV.

We asked them which conference sessions they are attending—and why.

These are their top picks:

1. Internet Plumbing for Security Professionals: The State of BGP Security

Presented by: Wim Remes

BGP routing leaks occur on a regular basis. It almost feels like we take it for granted but at the same time it undermines our trust in the Internet. In this talk, Wim Remes reviews the current situation for BGP, focusing on the practical implementation of available countermeasures through live demos and examples.

Why are we interested? BGP leaks are a serious issue that often slips under the radar. We are attending this talk to support Will’s call to “roll up the sleeves and get cracking at fixing our Internet”.

2. Server-Side Template Injection: RCE for the Modern Web App

Presented by: James Kettle

Feature-rich web applications often embed user input in web templates in an attempt to offer flexible functionality and developer shortcuts, creating a vulnerability easily mistaken for XSS.

In this talk, James Kettle discusses techniques for recognition of template injection, showing how to take template engines on a journey deeply orthogonal to their intended purpose and ultimately gain arbitrary code execution.

Why are we interested? We are interested in the practical demonstration of hijacking techniques for popular template engines and the discussion about automated countermeasures.

3. Back Doors and Front Doors Breaking the Unbreakable System

Presented by: James Denaro and Matthew Green

Governments are demanding backdoor access to encrypted data – particularly on mobile devices and in the cloud—as strong encryption becomes commonplace. On the other hand, privacy advocates have opposed backdoors since the 1990s and the battle is heating up again, this time on a global scale.

In this talk James Denaro and Matthew Green promise to provide a background on end-to-end encryption, a techno-political history of backdoors, and an update on the current state of affairs.

Why are we interested? The security vs. privacy discussion always strikes a chord, but we are mostly intrigued by the solution this talk offers—one that promises not to weaken encryption systems while still enabling limited government access to secure communications.

4. The Node.js Highway: Attacks are at Full Throttle

Presented by: Maty Siman and Amit Ashbel

The popularity of the Node.js coding language is soaring. Just five years after its debut, the language’s framework now boasts more than 2 million downloads a month.

In this talk Maty Siman and Amit Ashbel aim to raise awareness to its security issues during application development.

Why are we interested? Because Node.js is getting big and, as its popularity soars, security becomes a more pressing concern, one which is very relevant to what we do.

5. From False Positives to Actionable Analysis: Behavioral Intrusion Detection, Machine Learning, and the SOC

Presented by: Joseph Zadeh

This talk outlines an approach to modeling human behavior in network traffic with the goal of automatically labeling events that have security context. This is being described as the ‘next-gen cybersecurity analytics engine’ that can assist alarm reduction and attribution of attacks to threat actors and campaigns over time.

Why are we interested? Behavioral and reputational security analysis plays an important part in our own web application security and DDoS mitigation solutions. For the past few years much of our effort is invested in augmenting signature-based solutions with data that provide context to website visits.

That’s the word from our security team. Here’s the full list of the briefings at Blackhat USA 2015.